


The Mark of His Name

by TheGlintOfTheRail



Series: Revelation [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: 'The Sun Also Rises' levels of casual alcohol consumption, Cannibal Magneto’s School for Wayward Murderchildren, Codependent cannibal caresses, Complete, Dark Will, Hannibal Lecter has no chill, Hannibal the insecure cannibal, I think we've all had mornings after like this, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Post-Finale, Talk murdy to me, The way to a man’s heart is… um… you know what forget I said anything, These two are just... sooo fucking good at seducing each other, Will has been reading Vampire Cosmo, as much of a happy ending as these two maniacs are ever likely to get, brief Cop Will flashback, decisions are made of kneaded feelings, even steven, for once Will is driving himself crazy with minimal input from Hannibal, holy fucking shit Will, murder afterglow, murder scrapbooking, murdersexuals, non-sexual hannigram, ok I think we might be at Dark Will now, semi-dark Will, the calm before the murder storm, the murder equivalent of drunk dialing your ex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-04-29 11:35:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 25,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5126030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGlintOfTheRail/pseuds/TheGlintOfTheRail
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will's managed to keep Hannibal from killing for the two years they've been on the run, but Hannibal isn't the one who's been struggling against his restraints. Will doesn't know how much longer he can keep his own monster in check - or if he even cares to keep trying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name._  
>  Revelation 14:11 
> 
> This story follows on from the events of [Silence in Heaven,](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4794251) in which Will struck a deal with Hannibal after the cliff fall: stop killing, and you can keep me.

Hannibal drove through the sleeping city, flitting in and out of shadow as he passed beneath the streetlamps, maintaining a plausibly unsuspicious distance between his car and the one they were following. Almost childishly he hoped that Will, who must have tailed many cars himself in his career, could see from the passenger’s seat how expertly it was being done.

They were both a little drunk, and it was incredibly foolish for them to be driving – they, of all people, could scarcely afford to be pulled over. But Hannibal was not an amateur. He was more than capable of obeying the rules of the road, even in his current state.

Even as consumed as he was by what had already happened tonight.

It had begun so innocently. A man at the bar had been rude. So, of course, Hannibal had pointed him out to Will as potential prey, a game he played quite often. A game which Will, in the past, had typically refused to indulge, committed as he was to keeping Hannibal on a short leash. But tonight, with no warning, with this particular prey, he had done more than indulge it. He had encouraged it, fed it, participated in it. He had taken the fantasy farther than Hannibal had dared to hope he might.

Hannibal had seen the eyes of a predator in his face again.

And then they had seen the man begin to close his tab at the bar, and Will had brought his mouth to Hannibal’s ear and said “let’s follow him.”

How could he refuse?

They had waited for the man in their car, had moved it just outside the parking lot to a side street in order to make it less obvious when they began to tail him. They had waited for him in electric silence, Hannibal’s every sense heightened, muscles coiled and excitement crackling, and Will had smelled of the beer than the man had spilled on his shirt, spilled without even apologizing, and Hannibal had tried to focus on the task at hand through an almost overwhelming sense of glee.

And then the man and his friends had stumbled out of the bar and piled into their car and begun to drive, and Hannibal and Will had followed them.

But even still, despite his excitement, Hannibal did not really expect that he would kill with Will tonight. After all this time, he thought it would take more than one night of lightheaded yearning to make Will relax his rigid rules and kill what he would surely consider ‘an innocent man.’ This pathetic creature would not be the catalyst for the next stage of Will’s transformation.

But why, then, _was_ Will doing this?

Was he steeling himself to kill, playing through the first steps of a murder and seeing how they affected his still-present moral feelings? Was he following a sudden whim, curious to see what might happen if he did?

Or was he simply toying with Hannibal?

The dangerous thing about Will was that he might not even know the answer himself. Hannibal loved that about him. And that beautiful unpredictability was why Hannibal, despite his near certainty that Will would not kill tonight, was not playing a game. He was operating under the assumption that they _would_ kill the man.

He was going to make Will stop him.

And until then, there was no reason not to enjoy the fantasy.

So, then. They would do it just as they had said they would, sitting at their little table in the corner of the bar, fingers intertwined, breathing each other’s cruelty like air. They would take him when his friends drove off, as he drunkenly fumbled with his keys at the door. They would take him home, Will would tie him down. And Hannibal would watch Will release rivers of darkly shining blood from his body and claim his precious life.

They would do it however Will wanted it done. Quick or slow. Merciful or torturous. Clean or savage. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Hannibal could already feel his prey struggle and then grow still beneath him, could already see the blood slicking Will’s skin, could already taste the meat.

And then, as their quarry pulled through a yellow light just ahead of them, Will put a quick hand on Hannibal’s shoulder and said, simply, “Turn the car around.”

And Hannibal obeyed.

As they wound their way back to the house they shared, Will sitting quiet and unmoving beside him, Hannibal wondered happily if Will had any idea how much this little experiment had tormented him. How much it had strained at his careful composure. To be prevented from killing, that was no more than a dull throb of disappointment, familiar now after so many months living under Will’s rules.

But for Will to dangle _this_ in front of him? To show Hannibal a glimpse of the monster inside him and then slam the door shut on it again?

That was almost too much for Hannibal to bear.


	2. Chapter 2

Will woke up to a feeling of dread. He wished he could go back to sleep again, just for a while, so that he could avoid having to think about it all. About what he had done, and what it meant that he'd done it, and what the consequences might be.

He had crossed line after line last night. He hadn’t planned to go nearly that far.

He hadn’t intended to _play_ with him that way.

Prodding Hannibal to fantasize about a new kill, after all this time – he’d thought it would be safe. Not much different than listening to him talk about his old murders. Just another kind of exercise. But it had become much more than that, almost immediately.

Because Will hadn’t just listened. He had participated.

How long had it been, before last night, since he’d actually told Hannibal a fantasy of his own? Years. Not since before Will had tried to warn him to run and had wound up gutted on his floor.

He couldn’t believe he had told Hannibal all of the things he had told him last night, all the things he had thought about doing. He couldn’t believe he had exposed himself that way.

Another part of him couldn’t believe it had taken him so long.

But what Will _really_ could not believe – what he could barely even bring himself to admit – was the fact that he had actually allowed himself to stalk a random man as if he were prey. And had allowed Hannibal to see him enjoy it.

He couldn’t tell himself that that part had been a game, or a test, or a theoretical exercise. That it was only in his imagination. Will was still a trained profiler. He wasn’t in a position to lie to himself.

He knew that it had been a textbook escalation.

Many would-be murderers turn to stalking in order to explore their fantasies further, before they take the final step. Will had known that before he’d suggested it. And then he'd suggested it anyway.

* * *

Will found himself hoping, as he reluctantly began to get dressed, that Hannibal was either still asleep or else out of the house on some errand. But he knew that he wouldn’t be. Not today. Will was certain that today, Hannibal was awake and waiting oh-so-patiently for Will to come down to the kitchen.

So Will went down to the kitchen, because there was nothing else he could really think to do.

When he saw Hannibal sitting there at the kitchen table, reading or pretending to read a newspaper with a cup of coffee in his hand, Will thought about walking right out of the kitchen door and driving away, just so that he wouldn’t have to face him right now. Instead, as Hannibal glanced up at him, Will started making himself a cup of coffee so that he would have something else to look at, something to do with his hands.

“Good morning, Will.”

Ok. He had to look at him. Hannibal’s expression was… well, if it had been anyone else, the word would have been ‘glowing.’ But somehow, that didn’t feel quite appropriate here.

Will came around the counter and sat down across the table from Hannibal, who folded up his newspaper with a theatrical little gesture and set it aside.

Will sighed. He wasn’t going to let it rest for one single solitary second, was he?

No, he wasn’t.

“You continue to surprise me, Will. Last night was an unexpected pleasure.”

“Yeah, well, don’t get used to it.”

He wanted to believe himself. He wanted to believe that this would be the only time. It had to be. How much farther might it have gone? Might it go, if he tried something like this again?

It was as if Hannibal could hear his thoughts – or maybe his face had betrayed him. “It’s natural for you to feel anxious, given the limits you have placed on yourself. Tell me. Was there a moment last night when you thought we might really kill that man?”

Will was suddenly aware that he was holding his coffee mug between himself and Hannibal like a pathetic little shield.

“No," he said. "I still felt in control of my actions. But…”

But Will knew all about lines. How impossible to cross they seemed from one side, and then how looking back they seemed as insubstantial as smoke.

If he’d allowed himself to find out where he lived, the man would've never been completely safe.

“I stopped you from following him because I was afraid I might change my mind. Not lose control. Just… change my mind.”

There was no point in hiding any of this from Hannibal. Hannibal already knew.

“You have to be careful, Will,” he said. “When the time comes, it should be something you choose. Not the product of a sudden impulse. I don't want you to do anything that will distress you.”

“Sorry,” said Will, “but _since when_?”

Hannibal’s eyes flashed at that for a moment.

But then he replied, “All right, then. Will. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want you to do anything that you can’t live with having done.”

This was not quite how Will had imagined this conversation would go. “Are you actually telling me _not_ to kill?”

“Not at all," said Hannibal. "You are a killer. You have killed your attackers. But you have not murdered. Not yet. And if you had murdered that man last night, I suspect you would not have easily forgiven yourself for it. Nor me.”

“And what makes you so sure of that?,” asked Will, knowing that Hannibal was completely right.

“That man was not your type of prey. Regardless,” said Hannibal, “I must tell you again what a pleasure it was to hunt with you, Will. I hope to do so again. Under different circumstances.”

The person Will had thought he was before he met Hannibal would have told this Will to kill Hannibal now, where he sat, before this went even an inch further.

Instead, absurdly, he felt like he might be blushing.


	3. Chapter 3

Even though an alarm still blared in Will’s mind when he thought too long about it, Hannibal and Will had grown closer during the nearly two years they’d spent on the run. Will had justified it to himself in all sorts of ways.  _He won’t stay if I withhold too much. It’ll give me more leverage over him. It’s better than not having anyone at all._

So Will had let him in, and had been let in, in return. They knew things about each other now that Will was certain no one else knew – no one who was still alive, anyway.

But after that night at the bar, Will saw how much of himself Hannibal must have been holding back. Their lives weren’t any different. But everything was different. Hannibal was so open with him now. Before, whenever he had spoken to Will about killing, there had been something declarative in it. Something almost defensive.  _This is who I am. See that you don’t forget it._

It wasn’t like that now.

* * *

He'd avoided Hannibal for the rest of the day after that breakfast conversation, finding things to do around the house that required his full concentration. He had needed to just not think for a while. But he'd actually been relieved when Hannibal had found him at his workbench in the early evening and asked him, as he often did, to come and help with dinner. It had been too tense, just avoiding him. It was hard to be standoffish with the only person you knew.

It started off ok. Hannibal had Will chopping vegetables for a mirepoix, and he was pouring him a glass of wine.

“Thank you for your help, as always,” he said. “But I have to admit, I often have an ulterior motive when I ask for your assistance with dinner.”

“Oh yeah?” asked Will, more flippantly than he’d meant to. “Is it the pleasure of my company?”

Hannibal smiled and handed him the glass and made sure to meet his eyes.

“I like to watch you use a knife,” he said.

And he put his hand so gently over Will’s hand, the one resting on the counter, the one the knife was in.

The way he said it, the way he  _meant_  it – Will couldn't help but see it. The broad blade turned sideways to fit between the ribs, the resistance from the cartilage and the screaming, the spasm and collapse as both of their hands slid the knife out together, enameled from tip to handle with bright blood. Beautiful.

Will wanted to pull his hand away. Or he knew he should want to. But Hannibal was still looking right into his eyes.

That was what it was like now.

Now it was all smiles and glances from Hannibal, delicate touches and barely coded references from Hannibal, like the fact that they had killed was a private joke between the two of them, a joke Hannibal was constantly being reminded of.

Now Hannibal’s shining eyes followed him whenever he left a room, and Will could not tell what he was thinking.

Now it wasn’t ‘can I kill him?’ anymore. It was ‘can  _we_  kill him?’

And now, when Hannibal eyed a would-be victim in some public place, when he placed his hand on the small of Will's back and leaned in close to ask in a slow whisper if they could kill him, it did not feel at all like a game.

Will still said ‘no.’ He still meant it.

But he wanted to ask him how he would do it. He wanted him to tell him.

And thudding just beneath his consciousness was the thing he had begged himself over and over again to stop wondering.

Why not?

Why not?

_Why not?_

And a part of him, tiny and insistent like a rock in his shoe, wanted to say yes.

He didn't know what it would do to him to kill an innocent man. Could he live with it? Would he lose his mind for good this time? Or would he finally come to his senses and turn them both in? Or finally kill them both?

Would he even care?

It horrified him that he didn’t know.

It occurred to Will that he could ask Hannibal to stop asking him the questions, to stop talking to him about knives. To stop looking at him that way. But he didn’t.

_That’s why he wasn’t like this before. He was waiting until he knew I wouldn’t ask him to stop._

_What would he be like, if we just…_

Hannibal's patience was maddening. Despite everything else he was doing, he hadn’t once tried to convince Will to change his mind. He was accepting the ‘no’s as tranquilly as he always had. Will thought Hannibal was perfectly capable of waiting years for him to break.

No, Will wasn’t being pushed.

These were lures.

Hannibal was  _luring_ him. It was almost funny.

* * *

Hannibal had once made the nearly fatal mistake of underestimating Will Graham. He had let himself be deceived by something that, in retrospect, he should have known Will would never have done: he had let himself believe that Lounds was dead. Had been so eager to believe it. So sure that no one could understand him as deeply as Will understood him without becoming like him.

He had been so drunk with being seen that he had failed to see. To see Will as he was, rather than as Hannibal had hoped he was.

Hannibal knew now that he could not force Will’s becoming. So he would not push, although that was his first impulse. This required a delicate touch. He would wait.

He knew that Will was making a decision.

Hannibal was well aware that Will was strong enough and determined enough to defy him; putting pressure on him now would only push him farther away. But when Will was called upon to defy himself, the results were far less predictable.

He had to be ready. When Will’s decisions came, they came suddenly, and they sometimes involved plans for Hannibal Lecter’s death.

But in the meantime, there was no reason to disguise his delight.

* * *

It went on for weeks - the lures, the flirtations. And for every day of those endless weeks, all Will could think about was what it would be like to give in. How good it would feel, how horrible. How easy.

Why had he done it?

Why had he opened the door?

It wasn't just that night in the bar, although that had been... he had not felt that way in a very long time. No, this had been building. This was the inevitable conclusion of making no choice, of doing nothing, of existing in Hannibal's orbit.

Will had seen so much pointless suffering that any peace or beauty he could find in the world was precious to him. Unable as he was to stop feeling, not just for himself but for everyone, he sometimes felt like the balance scale of the world's suffering, with horror all heaped on one side and joy on the other. And he had felt very unbalanced for a very long time.

So unbalanced that the joy he knew he would get from giving in to Hannibal was starting to seem like a cure.

Will didn’t believe that there was any one true moral foundation. He had seen into too many minds operating on too many different sets of rules to harbor any illusions about that. He believed instead that a shared morality is simply the framework we hang a society on. It’s convenient to agree on the broad strokes of what’s right and what’s wrong. It makes things simpler.

But everyone modifies that shared morality to some degree, to suit their private needs. Most are too unimaginative or too timid to do more than make minor adjustments. But others dare greater changes.

They were both just waiting for Will to decide to change his rules.

People who are afraid of heights often say that they aren’t afraid of falling, but of jumping. It would just be so easy, and so irrevocable – hop a guardrail, lean from a window, and that’s it. Who with any imagination can avoid thinking about what it would be like?

Why had Will done it? Because he wanted to let himself fall. Had not stopped wanting it since the cliff, since before then, long before then.

Things couldn't stay the way they had been because he had done exactly when he'd aimed to do. He'd woken up the Ripper and asked him to play.


	4. Chapter 4

For months before this, Will had barely had a single dream, or if he had, he hadn’t remembered them. But now almost every night he would wake up with his heart racing from some vivid new one. They were varied and elaborate, but there was one constant – there was always blood in them. Blood spattered on a windowpane with the sunlight shining through. Blood pooling darkly into an open wound, filling it like a cup before spilling out onto the ground. Gouts of someone else’s new-shed blood slowly cooling on his skin. His blood. Hannibal’s blood.

These and a thousand other images flickered across his sleeping mind. It was almost like before, at the very beginning of all this. Back when he’d been chasing the Ripper without knowing what he was going to catch.

But now, the dreams were not nightmares. It was only when he woke up that he remembered to feel sick about them.

And when he woke up, Hannibal was there. He was always there, even when he wasn’t in the room he was there - it was as if he were always hovering just by Will’s ear, whispering _come play_. It was getting harder by the day for Will to remember why he had decided to say ‘no.’ He couldn’t handle a wrench or a glass or a pair of scissors anymore without thinking about how he could end a life with it. And when he wasn’t holding anything, he could feel his fingers twitch around invisible necks.

This wasn’t sustainable.

Will knew that there were many ways he could put a stop to it. But just now, there was only one thing he could bring himself to do.

He packed first, before he told Hannibal. He didn’t want it to seem like he was asking permission.

* * *

Hannibal had thrown himself into replanting the backyard garden when they’d first moved into this house, and now it was as extravagant and beautiful as everything else he touched. Will found him out there kneeling in the sun, smudged with dirt in loose gardening clothes and doing something or other with the new tomato plants.

Will saw him there, and suddenly he didn’t want to do this, and he knew that meant he had to.

“Hannibal.”

Hannibal looked at him, smiled, stood up. Will hoped he couldn’t sense his agitation, then realized that he almost certainly could.

“What can I do for you, Will?”

Will looked him in the eyes and tried to relax. It was important that he keep it together for this. He didn’t know how Hannibal was going to react, and he had to stick to his guns. _If he’s able to talk me out of it, then it’s too late anyway. Then I’ve already lost._

“I’m going away for a couple of weeks,” he said. “Alone.”

For just a moment, Will thought he saw the same black rage in Hannibal’s eyes that he’d seen in the kitchen on the night Abigail died. But maybe he hadn’t seen it, because then Hannibal said quite calmly, “I see.” He paused. “Would this be to ‘clear your head’?”

“Yes. To clear my head.”

Hannibal’s face was impossible to read. He wiped the dirt from his hands with a cloth, and Will wondered exactly how many throats those hands had crushed. _No. Keep it together._

“I trust you, Will,” Hannibal said at last. “You will take as much time as you need, and then you will come back.”

It might have been sincere. But it sounded uncomfortably like an order.

Or a plea. A plea to come back.

Meaning Hannibal thought he might be running.

“Yes, of course I’ll _come back_ ,” Will said. “I’m not a coward, Hannibal. You know I wouldn’t leave this way.”

“No,” said Hannibal, “no, of course not.” He smiled one of his tiny smiles, the ones that people sometimes missed altogether unless they knew him well. To Will it was as obvious as lightning. “If you ever leave me, I imagine you will bury a knife in my neck on your way out the door.”

Will had to smile back. “Well,” he said, “I’ll try.”

Hannibal just looked at him for a moment. Then he took a step closer and laid his hand carefully on Will’s cheek.

Will brought his own hand up to cover Hannibal’s hand. To hold it there.

They stood there like that for a long moment in the warm sun, neither of them speaking, and Will found himself hoping that they were never taken alive, because he didn’t ever want to have to explain all this to anyone else.

It was Hannibal who spoke first. “When will you go?”

“Pretty much now,” Will said.

* * *

Will gave him one last glance as he put his bag in the car, but after he got in and closed the door, he forced himself not to look. He didn’t even look back as he drove away, knowing that Hannibal’s eyes were probably boring a hole into the back of his skull. _Don’t let him see you look._

And then he just drove. He wasn’t even going anywhere, he hadn’t thought that far ahead; he was just going away. He drove west for four hours without stopping, without even slowing down unless he absolutely had to, aggressively willing himself not to think about anything at all besides the car and the road and the scenery. When he finally had to stop for gas at a huge filling station just off the highway, he realized he hadn’t even turned on the radio.

He didn’t fill the tank right away. Instead he parked at the far end of the lot, surrounded by an expanse of empty spaces, and let it sink in. When was the last time they had been this far apart? Almost two years. For two years they had barely been out of each other’s sight. Living in the same house, sharing almost every meal together, talking almost every day. Going days or even weeks without speaking to anyone else.

He couldn’t think straight in that house anymore. He couldn’t separate his own thoughts from Hannibal’s thoughts; he couldn’t tell where his desires ended and Hannibal’s began.

Will knew very well that there was no getting away from Hannibal. But with this space he could at least feel free to think. Without knowing that Hannibal was right there, watching him like a hawk, able to read practically every thought that crossed his mind.

He sighed and turned the engine back on and went to fill his tank. Then he pulled around to the vacuum station and pretended to clean the car as he tossed it for tracking devices.

He eventually found three – all planted, of course, before Will had ever said anything about leaving. Two had been very well-hidden, but the other had been slightly more obvious. A decoy, the one he was supposed to find. He tossed that one into a trash can, and dropped one of the others into the bed of a loaded pickup truck with out-of-state plates. The third one, he left where it was. _Let him think I didn’t find it. That might be useful later._

And once that was done, he got back into the car and tried to decide where on earth he should go.

Wherever he went, whatever he wound up doing, Will knew that he couldn’t just go back home afterward and try to let things go back to normal. Or, well, 'normal.' It was way too late for that. He’d let the balance shift too far when he’d shown Hannibal – when he’d shown himself, really – how much he wanted to give in.

If he didn’t do something, if he didn’t force some sort of drastic change, he was _going_ to give in. He was going to say ‘yes’ one day, when Hannibal asked him if some man should die. And that was unacceptable.

Will had opened the door. But he wouldn't be pulled through it. He was going to close it, or else he was going to walk through it all on his own. No matter what happened, he wasn’t going to listen to the whispers in his ear.

He would not allow himself to be seduced.


	5. Chapter 5

Will spent the next twelve hours just putting distance between himself and Hannibal. He stopped for the night only after his concentration began to slip and his car drifted over the rumble strips, shocking him back to awareness. _If I get caught because of a stupid car accident, he’ll break me out of prison just so he can kill me himself._

He grabbed a few hours of sleep at a cheap motel, and the traces of dream he remembered the next morning had clearly followed on from that train of thought, all twisted screaming metal. And he’d half expected to wake up and find Hannibal standing over his bed with a knife and one of his terrible smiles, saying _I’ve changed my mind about letting you leave._

But even still, he somehow felt saner on that morning than he had in weeks. It felt good, just the fact that he’d made some kind of a choice, even a small one. He was so tired of reacting. Of letting things happen to him.

He went down to the lobby and had some individually wrapped croissants and burnt coffee from a giant carafe. It was by far the worst breakfast he’d had since he’d run away with Hannibal. _Don’t think about Hannibal._ He drank his horrible coffee and flipped through the half-stocked rack of brochures by the reception desk and thought again about where he might go.

When he set off from the motel again, he started keeping an eye out for the ‘recreation area’ signs that marked some highway exits, and eventually he found a place where he could rent a little lakeside cabin and some fishing gear. It was an old tourist spot that hadn’t quite bothered to keep up with the times, all gravel roads and hewn-log furniture and no cable TV, and it wasn’t the peak season. So there wouldn’t be anyone around to bother him – no drunk teenagers in speedboats to disturb the quiet.

After he put down his deposit, he drove into town and bought himself some groceries and some whiskey. Then he came back to the cabin, he unpacked his bags, and suddenly for the first time in two years he found himself completely alone and with nothing at all to do.

Nothing to do but decide.

He wasn’t going to leave this cabin until he had decided. He was going to fish, and he was going to drink and sit and stare at the stars or the peeling wallpaper or the fire in the fireplace, and he was going to decide who he was.

We tell ourselves stories about who we are, and they seem so true. We set rules for ourselves and we obey them, and then we come to take the shape of the walls we've built. And whose rules had Will been following? Not his own. Never in his life. He’d learned so many sets of rules and he had followed them all so well – his father’s rules, his schools’ rules, the FBI’s rules. Hannibal’s rules.  

He was sick and tired of being nothing but a vessel for other peoples’ rules.

* * *

During the daytime, he fished. He didn’t catch all that much – he had nothing but substandard rental gear, and it wasn’t fly fishing, and it had been a long time since he’d fished at all – but when he stood on the pier or sat in the battered canoe and trailed his line quietly through the water, he felt like Will Graham.

When it grew too dark outside to fish, he would come inside and cook and eat what he had caught. And then he would start a fire in the fireplace, and he would pour himself a glass of whiskey, and he would weigh his options.

For the first two nights he had tried this, he had gotten nowhere. There was too much, it was too overwhelming, there were no good options left to him. His mind was logjammed.

He needed to find a way to sort through the chaos. The way he would sort through the contents of a case file, building and discarding theories one by one until he arrived at the thing that felt true. So he had too many options, none of them good – fine. Then he would weigh each option on its own merits, letting himself forget about all the others, and he would see where that led him.

He had to give each idea its due. This could not be rushed. Many of the options he was contemplating would redefine his entire life, his past and his present as well as his future.

No one ever talks about who you were before you became a murderer.

* * *

On the first night he tried this new method, he poured his drink and sat by the fire and said to himself – out loud, in order to make it real – “I could just say yes.”

Option one: give in. Just give in. Kill whoever Hannibal wanted to kill. Let himself fall.

Well, he had to honestly engage with the idea, didn't he? Pretending that he didn't want it when he really did was what had gotten him here in the first place. Being honest with himself was just getting all the facts on the table. What he did with those facts was up to him.

So, giving in. There were arguments in its favor. The main one was – god, he _wanted_ to. Wasn’t that why he had run? He wanted to kill. To kill with Hannibal. To be that monster again, to feel that awesome power. And to put an end to this ridiculous game, this suffering. To stop fighting. To lose himself completely inside Hannibal’s mind.

He could go back right now and throw himself at Hannibal’s feet and say: _I don’t want to decide anymore. Tell me what we’re going to do._

But... did he actually want to kill people?

He knew that he wanted to kill, he was long past the point of denying that. But did he want to kill _people_?

The man in the bar, the man who had started all this – Will had wanted that kill like air. But only the act of it. Not the result. Not really. He hadn’t wanted the man dead. In fact, Will was glad that he was still alive. He didn’t deserve to die for what he’d done.

And yet Will suspected, although it upset him terribly, that he was capable of overcoming that particular line of resistance. Probably more easily than he knew. No – of all the things that had prevented him from murdering that man, the fact that he deserved to live had not been the first among them.

More important was the fact that he just didn't want them all to have been right about him.

If they were caught today, with things as they were, he could live with the story of what he'd become. He could tell himself things about the greater good – the way he’d kept the leash on Hannibal so expertly, kept him from killing even while fighting his overwhelming influence. No matter what ridiculous names the tabloids called the two of them, he could live with it.

But not if he gave in.

What they would all see when they looked at him then, if they caught him with innocent blood on his hands? Not just the papers, but Alana, Jack. Zeller and Price.

Molly and Walter.

He couldn’t do that to them. He couldn’t do it to himself. Not when there was even the slightest chance that he might be found out.

Hannibal would certainly be disappointed to find that Will still felt that way. That he cared about what other people thought. But Will found that he did.

And there was a third reason, too, why giving in just wasn’t a workable idea: Hannibal couldn’t be allowed to win. Or even to think he had won.

_Because if he thinks he’s finally won, I won’t be able to control him at all._

Hannibal was terrifying enough when he was playing along with being restrained. But if Will handed back the reins…

No.

Giving in was off the table.

* * *

Each night, another drink, another fire, another option.

There was always the status quo. Go back home and reassert the rules, try to make things go back to normal. He thought for hours about how he might make that work, but he had already sabotaged himself too thoroughly. The old rules were no longer an option. Looking back, he was amazed that they had lasted as long as they had. Back to normal was a no.

Turn Hannibal in – and himself, perhaps, since he was an accessory. It was clean. It was probably what the broader consensus would have said was the right thing to do. But Hannibal would probably just find a way to break out again.

And Hannibal would hate him forever.

Besides, Will had already tried that. He knew that having Hannibal locked away would not quiet his own mind; would not make him want him, and what he represented, any less.

But it was a better idea than giving in. So turning them in was a tentative maybe.

The next night: kill him. Possibly kill himself, after, or possibly not; he could turn himself in, too, or stay on the run alone. All valid options.

_If he were dead and not just locked away, maybe it would be different. Like cutting him out of me. It’s not like I haven’t tried it before._

_And, god, does he fucking deserve it._

The things he had done to Will, to Will’s friends – the things he had tried to do to Will’s _family_ – Will had not stopped hating Hannibal for those things. They were the very definition of unforgivable.

If Will was honest with himself – which was, after all, the purpose of this exercise – he had to admit that there was only one possible reason he hadn’t killed Hannibal a dozen times over since the night on the cliff: because he loved him more than he hated him.

It was nice to know where he stood.

So killing him was a maybe.

There were many more options besides these to consider, none of them much more desirable. He used up most of his supplies after the first week and had to drive back into town to get more food and whiskey. As he drove away from the cabin, he imagined Hannibal watching the tracking device signal move across a screen, and he didn’t know how that image made him feel.

* * *

And then the day came when he had weighted and ranked every single possible course, except for one. The thing that fell just short of completely giving in.

But only just.

He had left it for last because he knew, he _knew_. He knew this was what he would want to choose. That was why he'd considered everything else so very carefully. He had been looking for an alternative. He had thought there was still a chance that he could stop himself.

He’d been so determined, after the night in the bar, not to go any further than he already had. Not to murder. So he had told himself that he didn't think anyone deserved to die.

But he had been lying.

Because he could not honestly say he regretted killing any of the men he had killed.

His type of prey. That was what Hannibal had said to him – _that man was not your type of prey._

Will knew what his type of prey was.

Garret Jacob Hobbes, Randall Tier, the Dragon. And Clark Ingram, if he hadn’t been stopped. All of the men Will had killed had been murderers. And he could find in himself no regret for those killings at all.

His heart bled for who they had been as children. Something had taken those little boys and turned them into monsters. But as adults? As adults they were irredeemable. They had deserved to die.

And Will honestly believed that he had deserved to kill them.

He didn’t quite want to believe it – there was still enough of the FBI left in him, of Jack, of Alana. Of conventional morality. He was self-aware enough to know that this was a terrible thing for him to believe.

But he did believe it.

Will had told Peter that he hadn’t deserved to kill Clark Ingram, and minutes later Will had pulled the trigger himself, and he had felt so justified.

Because what the man had done had offended him.

Because – what was it that Hannibal had said? – because it was _unspeakably ugly_ to him.

And, he thought bitterly, it was really not much of a surprise that he felt that way. He had spent his entire professional life as a tool for the destruction of murderers. Hell, he’d lost his job as a cop because he _couldn’t_ kill a man. And then he’d moved into forensics, where he’d sent men to death row with his professional testimony; and then, when he had finally killed with his own hands, his students had stood up and applauded him. He had been given a commendation. They had made a hero out of him for killing - but only when he had a flimsy temporary badge saying that it was allowed.

Only when they thought he hadn't liked it.

Legally, of course, there was no difference between this option and the first one. He would still be a murderer. But he looked inside himself and found that, for him, there was every difference in the world.

Even if they got caught, he thought he could live with being a man who had done this.

It almost disturbed him, how happy that realization made him. He had wanted to break so that he could blame Hannibal for it, but he didn't have to break at all. 

The only strike against this plan was how much it would please Hannibal. It wasn't precisely what he had hoped for, but it was close enough, and Will didn’t want to hand this to him as an unqualified victory. It would take an extraordinary amount of care, to present this in a way that kept the pantomime of control going and maintained Will’s position as the one who set the rules. That made it clear that this was Will's choice, not Hannibal's.

And if it all went wrong? If Hannibal showed that he couldn’t be controlled anymore?

Hannibal was a murderer, too.

It would be like cutting out his own heart. But he could do it, if he had to.

* * *

Will spent two more days by the lake, pretending that he hadn’t already made up his mind. And at the end of the second day, he found himself packing. He loaded up the car, cleaned every surface in the cabin more thoroughly than he needed to, and dropped the third tracking device onto the gravel road as he drove away.

He wasn’t going home. Not yet.

Before he went back home again, he needed to be sure.


	6. Chapter 6

The first time Will Graham ever saw a person die, he was twenty-two, just a few months out of the police academy. They’d gotten a tip about a mid-level coke dealer, and they had his house surrounded. A dozen cops, crouching behind their patrol cars, hearts pounding as they waited for him to come out shooting or for a signal to break down the door. They knew he was in there – he’d told them to go fuck themselves when they’d first showed up and ordered him to surrender – but they didn’t know if he was alone.

But around the three hour mark, they’d heard yelling. A man and a woman. And then they’d heard gunshots.

They’d rushed in then, Will running half on instinct as he tried desperately to tamp down the fear that was threatening to stop him in his tracks. This was his first active shooter. He’d suddenly realized that he could die here, in this house, tonight. _Twenty-two, I’m only twenty-two._

And then they were in, and Will had seen the man already face-down with three cops on him, forcing him into handcuffs; and he’d seen the others moving to clear the rest of the house; and then he’d seen the woman.

The dealer’s girlfriend, Anna. He recognized her face from the case file. She’d been shot in the chest, many times. Somebody was calling an ambulance. It wasn’t going to matter.

He had knelt down beside her and held her hand. Nobody else was doing it. He had held her hand and looked into her eyes, already too close to death to focus on his; he had watched as she gasped with shredded lungs, as the blood seeped from her mouth, and he had felt her panic and fear piled on top of his own, and it had been too much, and he had cried. And he had told her it was going to be ok, the ambulance was on its way, and he’d hoped that she’d believed the lie for the few minutes it took her to die.

A year later, he’d been attacked in the line of duty, and he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger, because he knew what it was like to die that way.

Later they found out that she was the one who had tipped off the cops. That was why he had shot her. It should have been a murder charge, which in Louisiana meant life without parole. But he was lucky. He had names. So they offered him a deal – manslaughter, seven years, witness protection, in exchange for the men he worked for.

The rage Will had felt when he’d heard that news had never completely left him.

* * *

In a suburb somewhere far away from Louisiana, a man known to his neighbors as Nathan Boyd was just beginning to fall asleep when he heard his doorbell ring.

Nobody ever rang his doorbell. Not at this time of night.

It was probably nothing. The men he'd betrayed all those years ago were mostly dead or locked away, and if they’d been planning to come after him, he figured they would have done it by now. But even still, for almost twenty years, he had barely slept through the night for fear of them finding him. They would not be merciful if they did.

So even though it was probably nothing, he took the loaded pistol from his nightstand and put it in the pocket of his bathrobe before he went to answer the front door.

He cracked it open, left the chain on. Standing on his doorstep was a man he didn’t think he’d ever seen before, with darkly curling hair and angry eyes.

The man said, “Virgil Weldon.”

His body must have tensed, or his face – he was never sure what had given him away. Before he’d even had time to wonder how he knew, the man had shoulder-barged the door and ripped the chain from the wall, he had punched him in the face and knocked him to the floor. He was on him, he was holding him down. Holding something over his face.

Weldon never even had time to reach for his gun.

* * *

Some time later, Will sat across from the unconscious form of Virgil Weldon, tied to a chair in the middle of his living room. He was drinking a glass of Weldon’s whiskey and waiting for him to wake up.

He shouldn’t have ever been in a position to know the man’s fake name, but he hadn’t worked for the most professional precinct. He never forgot the name, after he heard it. He had looked up ‘Nathan Boyd’ in public records a handful of times over the years, when he was in a black mood – it was easy once you had the name, especially if you worked in law enforcement. Each time he had done this, he had felt so incredibly guilty. Mostly Will had tried to forget that the man had ever existed.

But he still remembered where he lived.

It had to be him. It had be someone from before – before Hannibal, before the FBI, even. This was one of the building blocks of who Will was, and he was curious what would happen if he smashed it.

It would have been nice if he could have believed he was only there to get justice for the woman. But he had decided, in the cabin, to be honest with himself.

The waiting was starting to get to him. He didn’t think he liked doing things this way – knocking him out and tying him up and waiting for him to come around. It felt vulgar. But he’d had to make it so that Weldon couldn't fight back. He couldn't give himself that fig leaf. Not this time.

There needed to be no question whatsoever that this was cold-blooded murder.

And if he killed him while he was still unconscious, it would be too easy to disassociate. That was not the purpose of this exercise. So now Will had to wait for him to wake up.

When he did, Will planned to use a gun. It wasn’t some kind of big poetic statement, it just seemed simplest. He didn’t need to get fancy with this one. He just needed to see if he could.

He thought, _I’ll do it differently next time._

Something constricted inside of him.

He was afraid. He knew this was going to change him, and he had already changed so much. The man he had been seven years ago would never have come to this house.

How much more was he capable of changing?

And then, just when Will’s nerves had crept dangerously close to the breaking point, Virgil Weldon began to wake up.

Suddenly, inexplicably, Will felt a little calmer. It was almost time.

“Your whiskey is terrible,” he said.

Will saw Weldon take stock of his situation. Saw him realize what it meant that Will hadn’t hidden his face. He watched him struggle futilely against the ropes, and waited to see if he would feel sorry.

Eventually the other man gave up struggling. He glared at Will and said: “Pardon me for asking, but do I fucking know you?”

Will didn’t know how to begin to answer that question. “Yes and no, I think would be the answer to that.”

“God, I hate cryptic little bastards like you. What do you _want_ with me?”

“I’m testing out a theory.”

Weldon seemed to realize he wasn’t getting anywhere, and started fighting with the ropes again.

“There’s something I’ve been wondering,” Will said. He had stood up; he was standing in front of the chair. “How did it feel, killing her?”

“What?” asked Weldon. “Killing who?”

“Anna.”

“What the fuck kind of a question is that?” He was confused, now, and it was starting to make him panic. _Of course. Of course he’s confused. He’ll have thought this was about the men he used to work for. Not about her._

“It doesn’t matter,” Will said. “Answer it.”

“Shit, man, I don’t know! It didn't feel like anything!”

Will didn’t know quite why, but that was all he needed to hear. He downed the rest of his glass, thought about getting himself a second one, and decided he didn’t need it.

He pulled out his gun and pointed it at Weldon’s chest.

“No, no! Stop!”

He remembered Hannibal asking him, _How would killing me make you feel?_

He remembered saying, _Righteous._

Weldon was crying, now, no more tough-guy façade. “Stop, god, please just stop!”

Will hesitated. He could feel the other man’s desperation, his confusion, his pulse-pounding fear.

_Not this way._

He lowered the gun.

He heard Weldon, still weeping, say “Thank god, oh, thank god-“

Then Will pulled a knife from his waistband and stepped in close and cut his throat.

The world wrenched off its axis.

He felt a stream of hot blood spray him; he staggered back, he felt lightheaded, he fell to his knees, his ears were ringing. He could see points of light flickering across his field of vision like fireflies.

The dying man’s feelings were boiling through him like heat from a red-hot iron bar plunged into water. The man was afraid, he was in pain, he was _dying_ , and Will could _feel_ him dying, and mixed with the man’s fear was his own fear, sharp and acid, fear of what he had done, of what he might now do, and alongside his fear he felt grief for the man he had been.

But that was not all he could feel.

Mostly, what he felt was rapture.

Euphoria.

Righteousness.

And a part of him just stood outside his body, in awe and horror that this was him.

Drenched with blood, he knelt before the man, his victim, and he watched him die.

He had never in his entire life felt so powerful.

His first conscious thought, beneath that avalanche of feeling, was that he ought to ride this high straight home to Hannibal and kill him. Use this charge. But he knew that he wouldn’t.

And then, still hypnotized by the trails of blood that crept down the empty body, he saw his answer as if reading the auguries in the intestines of a sacrifice.

It came to him as fully formed as if he’d known it all along, blooming in his mind like a flowering tree. A way to shift the balance of power back in his favor. To offer Hannibal exactly what he wanted, but demand something precious from him in return. The way to wound him, reduce him, and yet draw him in even closer, make him need Will even more.

The way to make Hannibal belong to him, as irrevocably as he belonged to Hannibal.

And it was Hannibal who had shown him how.


	7. Chapter 7

For the first week of Will’s absence, Hannibal did not allow himself to worry. Will would be back, and there was no way to compel him to come back sooner; why not enjoy the novelty of being on his own again, after such a long time? For most of his life he had been a very solitary person when at home, and it was easier than he’d expected to fall back into the rhythm of living with only his own needs in mind, doing whatever he chose whenever he chose to. It occurred to him that perhaps this time apart would prove healthy for both of them.

In the second week, he began to feel the need to occupy himself with complicated projects. An uneasiness overtook him when he had too much time to sit and think. If he tried to read, he became distracted; if he tried to draw, he drew Will.

And on the first day of the third week, he found himself completely at a loss.

‘A couple of weeks,’ that was what he had said. Hannibal knew that he hadn’t meant ‘two weeks exactly,’ but even so, countless times a day throughout that third week, he would find that he had opened the GPS tracker on his tablet without realizing it. And then he would stare at a blinking dot at the edge of a lake many hundreds of miles away from him, and he would will it to move.

He wondered if Will was suffering from this separation as much as he was, and he suspected that he was not, and it hurt him terribly.

The rational parts of Hannibal’s mind, the parts that had protected his secrets for so long, had long since been silenced with respect to Will Graham. He had given up so many secrets to Will; Will had become such a part of his soul that it didn't feel unnatural.

But now, in the third week, with Will still gone, all Hannibal could think about was the day Will had told him ‘I don’t want to think about you anymore.’

The night he had told him ‘you were supposed to leave.’

How could he have given Will the chance to abandon him again?

It hurt him all the more to think these things because he _did_ trust Will, despite everything; not completely, he was not a fool, but he trusted him to honor his promise to come back. He trusted him not to run, not to stoop so low as to send the FBI after him. Not to betray him.

But then, Hannibal had found his trust in Will misplaced before. And the betrayals that had followed had almost destroyed him.

No. No, this was juvenile. He would come. Sooner or later he always came.

And when he came?

Hannibal knew that Will was going to come back to him changed. He had clearly been on the edge of a decision when he’d left. But what that decision might be, Hannibal genuinely did not know. There were so many possibilities. Some of them he hoped for so ardently that he could scarcely bear to think about them, for fear that they might not come true; but betrayal and abandonment were possibilities, too.

And of course, there was another possibility, the one they’d discussed in the garden before Will had gone: the knife in his neck. There was, he knew, a reasonable chance that Will might walk through the door and try to kill him. Hannibal was hopeful that he could safely overpower him, then, and persuade him to listen to reason.

And if he would not listen to reason…

Well. Hannibal would find a way to deal with that, if it occurred. There was no point in borrowing trouble.

* * *

Near the end of the third week, in the early evening, Hannibal was working in the kitchen when he heard a car door slam.

But Will was still at the campsite by the lake. Unless…

A moment, then a key in the deadbolt. The front door opening. It had to be Will. Didn’t it?

Why could he smell blood?

There were footsteps, they were Will’s, he would recognize them anywhere. Hannibal glanced down to make sure he had a knife close at hand, and he hoped desperately that he would not have to use it.

And then there Will was, coming in through the kitchen doorway.

Will.

There was a strange intensity in his eyes, so captivatingly strange that Hannibal noticed it even before he noticed that Will’s clothing was soaked with half-dried blood.

“Hannibal," he said. "I came straight here.” He was animated, electric, taut as a drawn bowstring. “I wanted you to see.”

Blood on his arms, blood on his chest, blood on his neck. He had washed his face and hair so that he could drive without attracting attention, and their cleanness was shockingly discordant with the rest of that savage vision.

In his hand, he was holding a bloody human heart.

Hannibal could not speak.

Will walked up to Hannibal where he stood transfixed at the kitchen counter, and he looked into his eyes, and he set the heart on the cutting board in front of him. It was human, there was no mistaking it.

Hannibal ached for this to be real. He had never wanted anything more in his life than for this to be real.

But he had not forgotten the night when Will had lied, and said he’d brought him Freddie Lounds.

And he was so disoriented, so shaken, that the only thing he could think to say was:

“Will. If this is another trick, I will tear out your throat with my fingers.”

He meant: please, tell me that this is actually happening.

Will grabbed Hannibal’s hand and yanked it up to press it against his throat, his fingers curling tightly over Hannibal’s, so that Hannibal could feel the words forming underneath his palm as Will spoke:

“Go ahead and do it, if you don’t believe me.”

He was angry. Angry that Hannibal had doubted him.

He would only have been this angry if it were real.

Real. It was real. Will was not lying. Will had murdered someone.

“I'm sorry,” said Hannibal. He found that he was breathless. Will’s hand, the hand that still clasped Hannibal’s hand against his throat, daring him to hurt him, was covered with shining blood. “Will, I’m sorry. Who was he? Tell me.”

Will softened a little at that, stopped glaring. He let go of his grip on Hannibal’s hand, but Hannibal did not move it. He could feel the pulse in Will’s neck. Will was standing so close that he could feel the heat from his body. The smell of the blood was everywhere.

Will didn’t answer Hannibal’s question. Instead, he said in a low voice that was not quite a whisper:

“The next time, I want you to be there. I want you to see. Will _that_ be enough proof for you?”

Hannibal was almost delirious. He still didn’t quite understand how this could be happening. He had imagined many possibilities for Will’s return, and this had been one of them, and yet… _Seven years. I’ve wanted this for seven years._ “I should have told you,” he said, “when you first walked in, how good it is to see you, Will.”

Will finally smiled.

“It’s good to see you, too,” he said softly. And then, “We’ll talk more over dinner.”

He laid a quick hand on Hannibal’s shoulder, and then he was turning and walking out of the kitchen and up the stairs, and Hannibal watched him go, resisting the urge to go after him. He heard a door opening and closing, heard Will turning the shower on.

He glanced down at his fingertips, still stained with mysterious blood from Will’s hands, and he was surprised to see them tremble.

* * *

Will had a panic attack in the shower.

He’d felt it coming on as he came up the stairs, and he managed to turn on the water and get undressed before it hit him; then he sat on the floor of the tub and did breathing exercises until his heart slowed down and he felt like he could stand up without fainting. But he didn’t stand up. He just sat and let the showerhead drum on him and watched the pink water stream down the drain.

Until he’d seen Hannibal, it hadn’t quite felt real.

Many years before this, he had pretended to be this person for Hannibal Lecter. He had pretended to be a murderer. And then he had spent many, many years pretending _not_ to be one.

When he had been pretending to be Hannibal’s, he’d had to take the words he actually meant and use them as camouflage for the lies. And afterward, he had alternated between holding Hannibal at arm’s length and trying to kill him, because he had known the entire time that this was exactly what would happen if he didn’t.

And now all that was over. No more pretending.

He was a murderer. Hannibal’s murderer.

He really had been angry, back there, when Hannibal had thought he might be lying again. Will had thought Hannibal of all people would have known how far past that lie he was. How far past it _they_ were. Would have been able to see, immediately, what he’d become.

He realized, with a sick jolt, that he’d been angry because he had been looking forward to seeing how proud Hannibal would be.

 _Oh. God. I really_ do _love him, don’t I?_

He hoped he knew what the hell he was doing.

After a few more minutes he stood up tentatively, making sure that his legs could support his weight again, and he started the long process of washing the dried blood from his body. It clung to the hair on his arms and chest.

It would have been easier if he’d washed it off right after, but he’d needed Hannibal to see it.

The heart, too. That had been entirely for Hannibal’s benefit. Will could accept eating it, he had long ago been forced to overcome his disgust at the idea of consuming human flesh, but he did not have Hannibal’s… pathology, or obsession, or passion, whatever it was. Will hadn’t gone to the frankly ridiculous amount of trouble of removing the man’s heart because he _wanted_ to eat it.

And for that matter, there was a reason why Will had carried the bloody heart to Hannibal in his bare hands, and then made sure to touch him, to leave blood on his skin.

He wanted Hannibal enthralled, before he said what he had to say tonight.


	8. Chapter 8

An hour later and Will was fidgeting in his bedroom and waiting until it was time to go down to dinner. He found that he was feeling almost shy, after the performance he’d put on in the kitchen. It had been so strange to be that person – stranger still because it had not been an act. A display, certainly, heightened and consciously directed, but it had been him underneath it. He had meant every word he had said.

They were still performing for each other, after all this time. But the performances meant something different now. They weren’t wearing masks anymore. They were just… playing games.

Will had been dressed and ready to go for a while now, but he didn’t want to leave his room until dinner was ready. To walk into the kitchen in the awkward few minutes before plating just seemed wrong for the occasion. If this was a performance, he needed to wait for his cue. So he waited until he heard the table being set, and then he gave it five more minutes before he went downstairs.

Their house had no formal dining room; Hannibal had learned a few lessons from the way he’d been caught in Italy, and besides, it wasn’t like they ever had company. Usually they ate their meals at a table in the open-plan kitchen. But as he came down the stairs, Will saw that Hannibal had moved some chairs around in the living room and set up a table in there, centered in front of the lit fireplace. He’d drawn the curtains and dimmed the lights for the sake of drama, and the glasses and silverware were glittering in the firelight.

As on edge as he still was, Will had to smile. He couldn’t believe Hannibal had managed to pull that off while also making dinner.

Will had never had one single person in his life, before Hannibal, who would have gone to that much trouble just for him.

He thought darkly, _who could blame me for what I’ve done to keep him?_

Hannibal heard his footsteps on the stairs and stepped out of the kitchen to say, “Will. Please, sit. I’m almost finished.” So Will sat, feeling several different kinds of tense, and after another minute of waiting he saw Hannibal stride in with two plates and announce in that ostentatious way he had, “Seared heart with a red wine sauce and roasted heirloom vegetables.”

He set a plate down in front of Will. Thin slices of heart, seared on the edges and rare in the middle, were fanned out among curls and spikes cut from red and yellow vegetables that echoed the fire in the fireplace.

Will had not quite been expecting to be moved by this.

“Thank you,” he said. “This is beautiful.”

“The pleasure is all mine.”

 _God, talk about an understatement_ , Will thought. _I can’t begin to imagine how much pleasure is yours right now._

The veneer was back, that almost inhuman composure. It always seemed so unchippable, until it chipped – like it had earlier, back when Will had walked into the kitchen.

Will liked being the only person who could really get a reaction out of Hannibal. He decided to give the veneer a little tap.

“It’s still so surreal,” he said, as Hannibal sat down across from him. “I haven’t even slept since it happened. When I woke up, I wasn't a murderer.”

Hannibal smiled broadly at that, as Will had known he would. _A murderer._

“Then tonight is all the more precious,” said Hannibal. “A liminal space between who you were and who you will be. You are standing in the threshold. How does it feel to stand there?”

How _did_ it feel?

“Terrifying,” said Will. “And… like a huge weight’s been lifted from me. I don’t know if I’m quite at ‘happy,’ yet.”

“Perfectly understandable. But that will come,” said Hannibal. Then he gestured to Will’s plate with his fork and said, “After you.”

 _Right_ , Will thought. _Right, let’s just get this over with._ He cut a piece of Weldon’s heart and put it in his mouth.

He expected to feel almost nothing, as he had when he’d eaten Tier – nothing but a vague uneasiness, a sense of having broken some unbreakable rule.

But, oh.

This was not like Tier.

Tier had been nothing to Will. Nothing but an obstacle, a problem Hannibal had thrown at him to solve. But Weldon?

_I’ve wanted him dead for twenty years. And now I’m eating his heart._

The heart that had pounded in panic as Will pointed the gun at him, the heart that had forced those rivers of blood from the cut Will had made in his neck.

That feeling he’d felt in Weldon’s house, the feeling that he deserved to kill him – that was such a human thing to feel. Everyone everywhere had felt that way about someone, at least once, even if they would never have acted on it.

But to feel that you deserved to _eat_ someone? That made that someone into less than nothing, not even a man. And it elevated you. Made you _more_ than a man. More than human. Will had understood that Hannibal felt all these things; he had experienced them through him. But he had never understood them as well as he understood them now.

It scared him.

Hannibal was watching him intently, and Will felt for the thousandth time like Hannibal was peering into his mind.

“Who was he, Will?” asked Hannibal.

“Virgil Weldon.”

There was no need to explain. Hannibal knew who Virgil Weldon was to Will; unsurprisingly, he had come up in therapy.

“Of course,” he said. “Perfect. Who else? He was the first to show you death, and now you’ve given it back to him. And after all this time, you still knew exactly where to find him. Perhaps you were always meant to be the one who killed him.”

Will shook his head. “There's no _meaning_ here,” he said. “I didn't kill him because it was poetic. I killed him because I needed to kill someone, and it occurred to me that he deserved it. He was... convenient.”

Will could see that Hannibal liked how clinical that sounded.

“Tell me what you did to him.”

“I knocked him out and tied him up. And when he woke up, I cut his throat. I won’t do it that way again. But I had to be sure that I could.”

Will was not sure he had ever seen Hannibal more delighted.

“No more hiding, then,” said Hannibal.

“No. No more hiding.”

“What was he like, in the moments before you cut him?”

Will glanced down at the pieces of heart on his plate.

_No more hiding._

“He cried.”

“They often do,” said Hannibal, and smiled.

Will knew exactly what Hannibal was. He had known it for a long time. To a certain degree he had even accepted it. But somehow, that still made him feel faint.

It was always going to mean something different, now, when Hannibal spoke to Will about murder.

“And," asked Hannibal, "how did it feel when you killed him?”

“It felt…”

He hesitated. How could he possibly explain? He decided that he couldn’t – not now, not fully, not so soon after. So he simply said, with a half-smile and a helpless shrug, “It felt good. You helped me see it, before. After Hobbes. ‘Doing bad things to bad people makes me feel good.’”

“I feel just the same way,” said Hannibal. “But I suspect we still differ on the definition of ‘bad people.’”

“Oh, you know,” Will said, “ _bad people_. Murderers.” He could see from Hannibal's reaction that this hadn't been completely unexpected.

With a mischievous look in his eye, Hannibal said, “Don't you think that's a bit hypocritical?”

Will couldn’t believe it, but he actually started laughing.

“Oh, please,” he said. “Like you've never been rude.”

And then Hannibal laughed, too, and Will realized that just by virtue of his circumstances, that had to have been the blackest joke he’d ever made by about a million times. He let himself enjoy that for a moment.

But then he needed to make sure that Hannibal understood how serious he was.

“I mean it," he said. "I can’t kill just anyone, Hannibal. I could never kill like you. I'm not as indiscriminate as you are.”

“’Indiscriminate,’” said Hannibal. “You make it sound so tawdry.”

“That’s because it is.”

Hannibal smiled. He loved it when Will goaded him that way. It meant that he was feeling confident.

Fascinating things tended to happen to Hannibal when Will was feeling confident.

“So,” he said. “Now that you have begun, what will you do? Who else’s blood do you thirst for?”

It was as good an opening as any. Will finished a sip of his wine and set down his glass and said,

“Yours.”

Hannibal’s fingers twitched to his knife, before he saw that Will was still sitting in his chair, stock-still.

Will knew it had been dangerous to come right out with that, after so much time away. But it put Hannibal on the defensive. It surprised him. That was what Will wanted.

He leaned in closer, locking eyes with Hannibal across the table.

“You know,” he said, slowly and deliberately, “I wish I _could_ kill you, Hannibal. You’ve taken so many people from me. You took and you took until I had no one left but you.”

Despite himself, he was starting to feel angry again. _Good. Use it_.

“You took away my friends, and you took away my allies, and you took away my _children_ ,” he said. “And it worked. Now I'm yours. Only yours.

“But you're not only _mine_ , are you?”

And now it was time to come to the point.

“You’ve taken every one of my children away from me,” he said. “But _you_ still have children. I’ve already killed one of them. Randall Tier. You sent him to me, and I killed him.

“Now I want you to send me the rest of them.”

There were god knew how many more of them out there, the other fledgling killers Hannibal had found and molded. His little disciples. Every one of them was an advantage Hannibal held over him, just as Tier had been – but more importantly, he cared for them. Will had seen it. He didn’t love them like he loved Will, but he was proud of the people he had helped lead to their becoming.

So Will was going to take them away.

“You made them what they are,” he said. “Their murders are your murders. Killing them is almost like killing you. If I kill them, I can… negate what you’ve done. I can reduce your influence in the world.”

Then he cocked his head and gave Hannibal a little smile, like he’d done in the BSHCI when Hannibal had made him say ‘please.’

“And besides,” he said. “You don’t want me to have anyone who isn’t you. Why should you get to have anyone who isn’t me?”

And then he was finished, and, god, that had been exhausting and terrifying. And oddly exhilarating.

And now Hannibal was staring at him, and Will could see the gears clicking in his mind, and he wondered if Hannibal was going to kill him in his sleep tonight. _Well, if he does, at least I gave it a shot._

Hannibal finally spoke:

“You have another reason which you neglected to mention, Will. You want to do this because it will hurt me.”

“Yes,” Will said. “That, too.”

“And why not just kill me?” asked Hannibal. “Since you admit that you still want me dead?”

Will had asked himself that question almost every day since the day they’d survived the cliff. And he had always known the answer. He took a breath and looked into the fire, so that he didn’t have to look at Hannibal.

“Do you remember what Abigail's father told her, right before he cut her throat?” Will asked. “He said ‘I killed those girls so that I wouldn’t have to kill _you_.’ I never really understood it before – I felt it, the way that _he_ felt it, but I didn’t understand.

“He was… compelled to kill her. He _needed_ to kill her. But instead of just killing her, he killed all those other girls. He loved her, and he needed her to die, and he killed them instead so that she could live. That’s why.”

_He loved her._

It was as close as Will had ever come to saying to Hannibal the thing he still couldn’t say out loud.

And then Will and Hannibal both sat there in silence, as Hannibal considered what Will had asked of him.

It really was a completely outrageous thing to request. Hannibal had done so much good with his therapy; he had helped so many people to become what they were born to be. Killing was his greatest joy in life, but he had been so proud of the work he had done with his most successful patients. It had given him a certain purpose he had lacked.

And now Will was asking to destroy them. To destroy his life’s work, his legacy. To erase the mark of his name from the world.

Hannibal glanced at Will again, and he remembered the man who had knelt on the floor of the Hobbes' kitchen in blood-spattered glasses and trembled like a terrified child. Who had told him in a broken whisper, as if it had been the hardest thing he'd ever forced himself to admit, that he had liked killing Hobbes.

Where was that man now?

He was glowing in the golden firelight, eating the heart of a man he had murdered, demanding the sacrifice of Hannibal’s children as jealously and pitilessly as a god.

For many years, every action Hannibal had taken had revolved around Will Graham. He had let himself be exposed for him, he had let himself be caught and caged for him. He had risked death for him. He had forgone killing for him. He had allowed his peaceful life to be completely uprooted.

But it was not until this night that he realized how completely Will had him in his power.

In exchange for the chance to watch him kill again, there was nothing to which Hannibal would not have agreed. There was nothing Will could have asked of him to which Hannibal could possibly have said no. Nothing.

And he knew that Will was perfectly aware of this – had established this tableau, this moment, had offered up this vision of himself so that Hannibal would have no hope whatsoever of refusing him anything.

His brilliant, cruel, beloved Will.

Hannibal fixed his gaze on Will again and smiled.

“You say you want to take them from me,” he said. “But Will. How can you take anything away from me, when everything I have is already yours?”

He raised his glass to Will, as if for a toast, and said,

“Kill them all.”

He saw a slow smile spread across Will’s face, as if he could hardly believe that this had worked. Then Will raised his glass as well, and they drank.

Let him destroy them all – all the rest of Hannibal’s legacy. He didn’t need them.

The only legacy he needed was sitting across the table from him, bathed in golden light.


	9. Chapter 9

After that dinner, Will slept for over sixteen hours, and was relieved to wake up feeling more like a person and less like a wrung-out dishrag. And then, after making some reassuring noises at Hannibal, he left the house again and went downtown for a while. He didn't have anything in particular to do. He just wanted to see if the world would look any different to him, now.

He thought to himself, as he wandered through the crowds of shoppers, that he must still be coming down from the high of that kill; how else to explain the fact that everywhere he looked, things seemed sharper, somehow, like he was wearing a pair of new glasses? The edges of things almost seemed to glow. He was hyper-focused on the smallest movements he could see out of the corner of his eye.

And beyond that, he felt an odd distance, a sense that he wasn’t actually out in the world at all, but was watching it from far away – too far away to touch or be touched by anything he saw. But if he was honest with himself, that distance was all too familiar. Will was used to feeling like a stranger, used to feeling like he didn’t belong in the same room with the people around him. Used to analyzing rather than engaging, hanging back, hiding in plain sight.

In a way, nothing was different now at all.

He spent the day wandering into shops and cafes, buying something in each place just so that he could make small talk with the people who worked there. He hadn’t spoken to anyone but Hannibal since he had become a murderer, and he wanted to know if he could still present himself as an ordinary man.

Somehow he felt as if he shouldn’t be able to. It seemed like something ought to show in his face. He wondered, as he spoke to the smiling cashiers and shop assistants and baristas, whether any of them would open up a paper someday and see his face with the word ‘murder’ beneath it and remember. If so, would they think, ‘I just had no idea’? Or would they think, ‘I could tell there was something wrong with him right away’?

But he found to his surprise that it was easy to be normal, almost easier than it had ever been. Certainly easier than it had been in months. Before Will had left home, he had been so overwhelmed by a flood of need that he had barely been functional. He had seen death everywhere he looked. Now that he had done what he’d done, the flood had receded, he was back in control of himself, and he found he could act, not just normal again, but like a better version of his usual normal – more confident, less prickly, more polite.

There was something almost chilling about that.

* * *

On the third day after he came home, Will asked Hannibal to put together a list of his former pupils. He wanted specifics – not just the names and addresses, but their backgrounds, their interests, their unique pathologies, details of their kills. Any information it was possible for Hannibal to find or to remember, he wanted.

If Will was going to kill them, he wanted to know them first.

He told Hannibal to take his time, and said he’d ask for the list when he felt ready. He was still getting used to how he felt about Weldon, and he didn’t want to rush right into the next one. He wanted to give himself time to absorb what he’d done.  

He didn’t feel guilty, but it felt wrong that he didn’t, like a tingling in some phantom limb where his morality used to live. Before he cut it away. It was deeply unsettling. But even more difficult to get used to was the fact that he still felt so damned _good_. 

It had been so hard to cope, after Hobbes. He hadn’t even been able to acknowledge to himself that he’d liked it, until Hannibal had dragged it out of him. And even then, it had been so hideous to admit it. He had felt disgusting, perverse, inhuman. He could never have imagined, back then, that he would one day find himself wanting to do it again.

And then he’d killed Tier, and it had been so much easier, and he’d liked it even more, and he had told himself that it was just part of his cover, the liking it. Part of the honey trap. _He’ll never believe me if it isn’t real. I_ have _to like it. It’s my job to like it._

And then, he had killed the Dragon, and he’d loved it so much that he’d tried to kill himself right after, because in that moment he had known beyond the shadow of a doubt that he would certainly kill again if he let himself live.

And now, here he was.

When his thoughts wandered back to the times he had killed, as they did very often now, he remembered only an echo of the horror and disgust he had felt toward himself in the beginning. Instead he remembered the righteousness, and the power, and the blood. The way their deaths had made the world feel cleaner. The way their bodies had danced as they’d died. 

For decades, Will had allowed himself to feel feelings like these only while playing the roles of the people he was chasing. He had been inside the minds of countless murderers; he understood their unique pathologies better than almost anyone alive. But now that it was him, it did not feel pathological.

He knew that didn’t mean that it wasn’t. He knew exactly what Will Graham the long-ago FBI profiler would have thought of Will Graham, Murder Husband. He thought that perhaps they were both right – the ghost of his profiler self and the murderer he’d become. Both the past and the present Will Grahams had acted precisely as their beliefs dictated. That was really all anyone could do.

Will needed time to get used to all of these strange new things he felt, to the uncrossable boundary between who he had been and who he was. But he also needed to give himself time to have a change of heart. Or, more accurately, time to be completely certain that he would not have one. He knew that if he leapt straight into killing impulsively, he could say, later on, that he hadn’t known what he was doing. He could say he’d been manipulated. Brainwashed. That was what he could have told himself if they’d killed the man from the bar that night.

It would have been a lie, but he could still have said it.

He thought again of how much easier it would have been, to give in that way. To drug himself with Hannibal, to let Hannibal pull him behind the veil and twitch it closed again. But some part of him would always have fought it, he knew. This way – committing his first murder alone, giving himself this long stretch of time before the next one – this way he knew without a doubt that it was him. His choice.  That knowledge was both empowering and horrible, and he clung to the part that was horrible, because it meant he was still a human being.

* * *

Giving Hannibal the task of assembling the detailed list not only allowed Will some time to prepare himself; it also had the side benefit of occupying Hannibal’s attention with something other than Will. Both of them had always valued a large amount of time spent alone, and that was one of the things that had made their strange partnership work, over the past few years. But now, Will could see Hannibal struggling not to follow him around the house all day like a baby duck. For both of their sakes, he needed something else to do with himself.

But aside from this problem, which Will reluctantly admitted was almost as flattering as it was annoying, things between the two of them had never felt easier. Will felt a level of comfort around Hannibal now that he was surprised to discover he was capable of. When they spent time together now – talked together, cooked together, cleaned the house together, ran errands together – he no longer felt quite the same sense of guarded tension he’d always felt before.

It was… nice.

He would never drop his guard completely, of course. This was still Hannibal Lecter he was dealing with. But now, his guardedness was coming from a place of pragmatism, rather than from a desperate struggle to keep himself away.

It helped that the lures and the questions had stopped. Hannibal was letting Will set his own pace now, only touching on the subject of murder if Will brought it up first. Will suspected that Hannibal was worried he would change his mind again if he was pushed too hard.

He was being so careful that he hadn’t even raised the question of whether he would be allowed to kill again, now that Will’s rules had changed.

Will knew that he was going to let him. He wasn’t going to just turn him loose, but there was no question: he wanted to kill with him again. He wanted another night like the night with the Dragon. But he was trying not to think about that, because he was going to see how long he could hold out. It had become very clear to Will that withholding something Hannibal wanted was an excellent way to control him.

_All I have to do is give him a little dose of what he wants from me, and he does exactly what I say._

Oh, it worked amazingly well. Too well. Will could see exactly how this tactic could turn against him, if he ever dropped his guard. The next time Will needed to force Hannibal’s hand, and the time after that, and the time after that, what else would he wind up having to give in exchange?

_I need to make sure I know exactly where this stops._

_God. How many times have I said_ that _?_

* * *

Most nights after dinner, now, they would go have a drink in the living room. It was almost a ritual. Hannibal would always have drawn the curtains and dimmed the lights and started a fire before they went in, as he had for that ceremonial dinner. It made the room so different from the sunny place it was during the day. Will had never stopped being amused and exasperated by Hannibal’s insistence on presentation; sometimes he wished he’d just lighten the hell up already, and stop art-directing his entire life. But he had to admit that there was something about the dark room and the flickering fire and the glass in his hand that made it easy to go into a particular mindset, and to leave it there if he needed to. He was grateful for that.

They talked about killing only during those nighttime conversations. Will preferred it that way. It made the daytime into a safe space, where he could… not hide from that mindset, exactly, not anymore, but just take a break from it. Focus on other things. That way, at night, when he did come back to it, he was more open. Less afraid.

They talked about their old kills, some nights, as they had done since they’d gone on the run; but now there were so many new things to talk about. Before, Will had listened to Hannibal’s stories and asked him questions as an outsider peeking through the veil. Now he asked questions not only out of curiosity, but because the answers were suddenly, terribly relevant to him.

* * *

One night, in the third week Will was back, he asked Hannibal, “What's your favorite way to kill someone?”

Hannibal hesitated. He knew that he and Will did not necessarily delight in the same things, and he suspected that Will would find his answer offputting. But he supposed he should honor Will’s new commitment to honesty by being honest himself.

“There are two different answers, I suppose,” he said. “Strangulation is very intimate. To hold their pulse and their breath in your hands, to look into their eyes, to feel their body slow and collapse, is an intensely personal way to kill.”

Will thought, _Beverly._

“But vivisection is much more fascinating and beautiful,” Hannibal continued. “The operation of the living organs is something so few people are given the chance to see. They glisten and twitch in the open air, and the body can go on living for quite a long time, even after a surprising number of pieces are removed. And for the victim, the particular horror of seeing one’s own organs cannot be replicated by any other torture I know of. You have never heard such screaming."

Will thought, _holy fucking shit._

He’d known that Hannibal had killed that way, but he had never heard him describe it so… lovingly. He wished he hadn’t asked – but no. _No more hiding, remember? I’ve chosen him. I don't get to lie to myself about what it is I've chosen_. And it was good to get these little reminders of how different they still were. Even though he had seen a flash of the beautifully gleaming organs through Hannibal’s eyes, he was perversely relieved to find that it was still possible to horrify him.

“You know,” he said, feeling slightly nauseous, “sometimes you don’t exactly make it easy to like you, Hannibal.”

"If I were easy to like, Will," said Hannibal, with a smile that was almost sad, "you would not be as precious to me as you are."

That stopped Will in his tracks. He almost forgot his disgust entirely. Sometimes Will looked at Hannibal and saw a void in the shape of a person; and then sometimes he would say something so human that it practically broke Will’s heart. Will had never gotten used to that.

He almost felt like he ought to apologize, but then he remembered what he’d be apologizing for. Instead, he just said, in a less accusatory voice than he’d used before, “I'm not interested in torture. Even for Weldon- I didn't need to see him suffer. It would have made me feel awful to do something like that to him.”

“What does interest you?”

Will had given that question a lot of thought in the past few weeks. But this was the first time he had really said any of it out loud. “Fighting,” he began. “Winning. Quieting them - feeling the pain they feel and then the quiet - I never forgot that, after the first time. It’s like I’m dying too. _”_

 _Beautiful,_ thought Hannibal. He made a note to ask Will, another time, what it felt like to die.

“And the physicality of all that,” Will continued. “The way they… yield. The blood. All of that stuff is the kill, the kill itself. But the kill itself isn’t even the main thing.

Mostly…”

He paused. It felt important that he get this right. He wanted to make Hannibal understand.

“There are so many hideous things in the world,” he said. “So hideous I can't accept them. And I can’t ignore them either. I can’t pretend I don’t see. And those things, they _grate_ on me. Dig into me. Like my clothes are always full of little shards of broken glass.

But now, it’s like I can just sweep the hideous things away. Now I know that they only exist until I decide to stop letting them exist. And it makes me feel like the whole world is… cleaner, because of what I’ve done. Because of what I _will_ do. Because of me.”

Something occurred to him.

He asked, “Is that… how it is for you?”

“Almost precisely,” said Hannibal.

* * *

It was easy, now, for Hannibal to be patient again. Now that Will’s next murder was almost guaranteed, he didn’t care how long he had to wait for it. The waiting was just something else to enjoy. He could plan, prepare, imagine; wonder how Will would do it, and what it would do to Will.

He was aware that the reasons Will had given for wanting to kill his former students were mostly smokescreens. Will had presented it as grand operatic revenge, as a way to kill little pieces of Hannibal; but for the most part, Hannibal’s children were, like Weldon, merely convenient. Means to an end.

Really, Will had just wanted to see if Hannibal would say yes. He was trying to find out just how much Hannibal would be willing to sacrifice for him, just how far Hannibal would allow himself to be pushed.

Hannibal was curious about that, himself.

He was also curious how much farther Will would be willing to compromise his professed principles, in order to drag more of these concessions out of him. He was already using human lives as bargaining chips in his game with Hannibal, and they had barely even begun. Hannibal had never been so proud of him.

It was going to be a shame to lose his students. The world would be less rich for not having them in it, and he regretted their loss immensely. But how much richer was the world for having Will in it? And how much more irrelevant could those students’ lives seem to Hannibal, compared to the idea of seeing his Will kill again?

It was hard for Hannibal to believe, as he reflected on what was to come, just how little violence he had seen Will deal out. He had seen so many aftermaths, so many near misses, had been threatened by him so many times – but the only violent act he’d seen Will commit with his own eyes, until the Dragon, had been the mutilation of Cordell’s face with his teeth. Hannibal had lived on that mental image in the BSHCI; it had been magnificent. Until then, he had only dared to hope that Will contained such animal brutality.

And the night of the fight with the Dragon, even though they had both been badly injured and fighting for their lives, Hannibal had seen brief flashes of a cruel and gorgeous rage in Will that he had never managed to glimpse before or since.

To see it again, for even a moment more, Hannibal suspected that he would let himself be pushed very far indeed.


	10. Chapter 10

It was eight weeks before Will asked for the list of names. He had wanted it after six weeks, and then he had waited two more because somehow it seemed like the thing to do.

He finally asked for it early one afternoon, as they sat at home in companionable silence, Will sprawled on the couch with a book and Hannibal at the table with his drawings. Suddenly it was just time. He glanced up from his book and looked over at Hannibal and asked, a little too casually, “Is it ready?”

He saw the tiniest little thrill run through Hannibal’s body before, equally casually, he said, “Yes. Would you like to discuss it tonight, after dinner?”

“Sounds good,” said Will.

And then Hannibal gave him a quick smile and went back to his drawing, and Will went back to his book, and neither of them found it at all possible to concentrate.

* * *

It was the same after-dinner scene as always – drawn curtains, fire in the fireplace, sparkling whiskey glasses – but this time, when Will followed Hannibal into the living room, he saw on the coffee table in front of the couch a stack of black hardbound notebooks, each with a name in white on its spine. There were dozens of them.

“Christ,” said Will. “And here I thought I was special.”

Hannibal chose not to dignify that bit of baiting with a response.

“They may not all be up to your standards,” he said instead, sinking onto the couch as Will went to pour the whiskey. “Many of them were manipulated quite heavily, and will never kill again, at least not without my influence. But I thought I might as well be thorough.”

“You thought you might as well show off, that’s what you thought,” Will said, and a quickly suppressed grin from Hannibal showed him he was right.

_Unbelievable._

Will sat down next to Hannibal and handed him his glass and asked, “How did you choose all of these people, anyway?”

“They chose themselves,” said Hannibal. “Or rather, they demonstrated their potential by responding appropriately when prodded. Then it was simply a matter of continuing to prod, and seeing who continued to respond, and in what ways.”

Just briefly, there was a cold feeling in the pit of Will’s stomach. He remembered the day he’d met Hannibal; how he’d glowered over the rim of his glasses as Hannibal asked him cheerfully invasive questions; how he’d muttered ‘my thoughts are often not _tasty_.’

 _God. He must have thought he'd won the damn lottery. If I could have just managed to act_ normal _, for once…_

_Oh, well._

He put out the coldness in his stomach with a swallow of whiskey, and he picked up a book.

They spent close to two hours just sorting through them, briefly discussing each student – each ‘case,’ as Will couldn’t help calling them – and setting aside the ones Will deemed undeserving of death. He wasn’t interested in people who had killed out of desperation or panic, or because Hannibal had somehow tricked them into it. He only wanted the passionate ones. The artists.

Hannibal wondered if Will had been thinking of Abigail, when he came up with those criteria. But he didn't ask. Her name was one of those things he did not mention around Will unless Will mentioned it first.

In the middle of the pile, Will found one notebook each for Alana, Margot, and Bedelia. He put those aside without opening them or looking at Hannibal, although for a split second his hand had lingered over the last one. But he really didn’t think she’d kill again, and although he hated her with an almost irrational passion, she had been the one who’d believed him when no one else had. It had saved his sanity. He couldn’t kill her, although he sort of wished he could.

And then, finally, they were finished, and the floor in front of their feet was covered with piles of discards, and a neat stack of eleven notebooks remained on the table.

Will finished his most recent glass of whiskey and said, “That seems, um… manageable.”

He was feeling oddly panicky, all of a sudden – _eleven, I have to kill eleven people, I’ve_ decided _to kill eleven people_ – but he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t oddly thrilled, as well. And for that matter, he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t oddly enjoying what all of this was doing to Hannibal. He was as composed as ever, but underneath the composure he was clearly a giddy mess. It was kind of great.

“How many of them would have done it,” Will asked, “if it wasn’t for you?”

“Of these? Perhaps… half,” said Hannibal. “And most of the others were only held back, in the beginning, by their fear of being caught. But we never truly live, if we let our fears rule us.”

“Thanks, Murder Socrates.” Will picked up the book at the top of the stack and flipped it open again. “Tell me more about this one. Arthur Shore.”

“Oh yes, Shore. Lovely work. The papers call him Geppetto, but I’m certain he doesn’t like it.”

There were photographs, probably sourced from Internet shock sites or Tattlecrime.com, of the nine victims. They were pasted into the notebook in the order of their deaths. The first few had been brutally clawed at, muscles and gore exposed on their necks and hands and arms. After that, they were different - he’d begun to use a knife, and Will could see his design more clearly. He hadn’t meant to tear them up that way. He had just been looking for the veins.

On the later victims, the veins had been excised and pulled out whole, dozens of them. They spiraled from the bodies, coiling on the floor around them as if they were trying to crawl away; or maybe it was more like the bodies were sea anemones, their tentacles waving in the current.

It looked as if he had cut their throats first, which was a small mercy.

Will asked, after he’d finished paging through the photos, “Why does he do it?”

“Because he thinks they want to get out,” said Hannibal. “Look at them there on the back of your hand – isn’t it just a bit maddening, how they barely bulge above the surface? How the blue of them stands out so strongly against the paleness of your skin? To him, it’s completely unbearable. The only thing that matters to him is setting them free. As a matter of fact, he began by trying to do it to himself; he has terrible scars. On his last attempt he dug too far and nearly bled to death, and his family believed it was a suicide attempt. They insisted that he go to therapy.”

“I don’t know about you,” said Will, after a moment, “but I think I need another drink.”

“I wouldn’t mind one.” Hannibal picked up the book and flipped through it with a faraway look on his face. “It was a subtle push, with him. I don’t believe he even knew that I knew. Of course, if he follows the news, he certainly knows now. Or suspects.”

Will thought again about the mutilated bodies, and said, “A _subtle push_? What the hell did you _say_ to him?”

“The compulsion to harm oneself is often a manifestation of an overwhelming emotion, turned inward,” said Hannibal. “I merely began to suggest, in various ways, that he might try turning his emotions outward instead, and see where that led him. When I saw the first body on the news, I knew that we were making progress.

“His earliest attempts were quite rough, as you noticed. Those first few have never been officially linked to the Geppetto case. I believe he was using his fingers. But one day I allowed him to see me using my scalpel to sharpen a pencil, and told him offhand that a scalpel was the only thing for truly fine detail work. His art became much more precise after that.”

Was Hannibal actually _bragging_? There had been a time, even after they’d run away together, when he had been careful not to say things like that around Will at all. _He's really turned off the filter now that he's not in mixed company anymore. Relax, have a drink, we're all murderers here._

Will said, “Let’s start with him. How should we take him?”

“He would come with me willingly,” said Hannibal. “He trusts me. I could bring him straight to you.”

Something about that made Will feel a little ill, but it was obviously the cleanest way. “Works for me,” he said.

“How will you do it?”

Will considered it. “Is he strong? Could he put up a fight?”

“I believe he could, yes.”

“Good,” said Will. “Don’t restrain him. Just make sure he isn’t armed.”

* * *

The next day, they packed their bags and started driving. There was planning to do, but they could do that in the car during the sixteen-hour trip to the town where Shore lived, or in the motel once they got there. There didn’t seem to be much of a reason to wait; neither of them could afford to overthink this any more than they already had.

And besides, for Will, it was going to be easier to talk through it in the car than it would have been at home. In the car, he wouldn’t have to make eye contact. The way Hannibal sometimes looked at him these days, when Will talked about killing, was… well, it made him uncomfortable.

He was also pretty sure he liked it, and that made him even more uncomfortable.

So as they drove through hours and hours’ worth of flat, endless fields of corn and soybeans, switching off every few hours and scrupulously obeying every single traffic law for fear of being pulled over, Will fixed his eyes on the center line while they talked about how he would kill his next victim.

The main thing was, they needed to figure out the best place to do it. He lived much too far away to safely transport him back to their house, and it was too risky to do him in his own home, like Will had done with Weldon. He’d gotten a hell of an earful about that, once Hannibal’s afterglow had faded a bit, and even though he hadn’t appreciated the lecture – seeing as how he was a damned ex-cop and leading forensics expert who knew perfectly well how to secure and clean up his own crime scenes, thank you very much – still, he knew it had been reckless of him. There was no reason to take unnecessary risks this time.

Shore lived in a post-industrial Southeastern town, the type that was bound to be full of long-since-abandoned factory buildings. They’d choose one of those, they decided – maybe something damaged by fire or flooding, a place no one would normally choose to go. They’d stake it out, check it for squatters, make sure there was no fresh graffiti. And then they’d find a place in the basement where the floor was dirt or the concrete was cracked, and they’d dig a grave. There weren’t going to be any displays, not with these victims. All of them could be traced back to Hannibal, no matter how well he had covered his tracks, and Hannibal was supposed to be dead. Both of them wanted to keep it that way.

As they talked through the basics of the plan, fine-tuning it, bouncing ideas off each other, Will started to feel a bizarre sense of déjà vu. In his previous line of work, essentially this same conversation would come up every now and then, on a drunken night out with colleagues – the ‘how would _you_ get away with murder’ conversation. Will had always found it tasteless, but he’d indulged in it once or twice anyway, mostly when somebody else was just so totally _wrong_ that he couldn’t stand it anymore and he had to jump in. And on those occasions, he’d had this odd feeling – this kind of surety. This sense that, yes, this was just a stupid game, but… I could, couldn’t I? Knowing everything I know? I could _absolutely_ get away with it.

Even way back then, before Jack, before Hannibal, a part of him had liked that feeling.

* * *

They found a horrible motel in the next town over from Shore’s, the kind of place that would take payment in cash and not ask for ID. They were being extra cautious, now – they didn’t want to link any of their false identities to this time and place, not even the throwaways.

Will had expected Hannibal to be scandalized by the motel, but he had underestimated him. Will didn’t hear a single complaint. And throughout the next week, as they selected and prepared the building they planned to use, as they laid the groundwork for the murder, Will realized that he had never, in all the years they had known each other, seen Hannibal’s mind more engaged.

Hannibal could lose himself in so many different passions; when he cooked, or composed, or sketched, he sometimes almost seemed to slip into the act of creation the same way Will slipped into his reconstructions. But now Will saw that those passions of his were mere hobbies and pastimes, compared to this. This was, so clearly, his life’s purpose.

Will almost felt guilty that he’d kept it from him for so long. Not quite, but almost.

And then, finally, the grave had been dug and Will’s knife had been sharpened, and it was almost time.

* * *

Will couldn’t fall asleep the night before; Hannibal had anticipated this and given him some pills, but he hadn’t taken them yet. Instead, he just lay there underneath the scratchy sheets and watched Hannibal’s sleeping form on the other bed, and brooded over what they were about to do.

When he’d decided he could stand to become a murderer, he had tied himself to Hannibal irrevocably; this was going to tie them together even more. As close as they had been before this, as much as they had already shared with each other, this was going to mean something new. He wondered if it was ever going to stop – if they’d ever reach a point where they couldn’t get any more conjoined without one of them breaking. Time after time, Will had thought they’d hit that point, and then time after time they had barreled right past it.

He knew it wasn’t healthy – he knew it was codependency – and yet it was so strangely comforting. He had alienated so many people in his life, had driven so many people away, and he had never imagined that he’d meet someone who refused, categorically, to be driven away. Someone who could love every part of him. Who could see the most appalling, unspeakable thoughts in his head, and could love them.

Will realized that Hannibal must have thought something very like that, when they had first met.

_Well, of course he did. Isn’t that why he took the rest of my life away? So that I’d have no choice but to love him back?_

He sighed. This wasn’t going anywhere productive. He sat up and took his pills and lay back down again, and after a while, he slept.

* * *

Hannibal felt a bit wistful, that next afternoon, as he crunched through the dried leaves covering Arthur Shore’s front walkway. He had liked Shore, and he didn’t like all of them; after all, a therapist’s job was not to like the patient, but to help him. But this one… he had such a fascinating perspective on his world. And his work was so delicate. It was going to be such a shame to see him go.

Not even for a fraction of a second did Hannibal have second thoughts.

He rang the doorbell and waited. After a minute he saw a tall, thin man with darting eyes peering at him through the screen door.

He watched surprise and shock dawn on the man’s face. “Doctor Lecter?” he said. “You’re… sorry, I mean, but… aren’t you _dead_?”

“Evidently not,” said Hannibal. He gave the man a broad, affectionate smile. “May I come inside, Arthur? I wanted to talk to you, just for a moment, about your wonderful progress.”


	11. Chapter 11

Just outside the town where Arthur Shore lived and worked and made his art, there was an abandoned furniture factory of solid brick, five stories tall. It had been left sitting empty for fifty or sixty years, located on land too worthless to justify the cost of tearing it down and building something new there. The upper floors were collapsed in places, and it wouldn’t be too long before the whole internal structure went, leaving a hollow brick shell around a pile of rubble; but, for the moment, it still stood. It was late afternoon, now, and there was golden light pouring through the empty holes where the windows had been, illuminating the edges of the mounds of debris and smashed-up old furniture.

Will Graham stood in a room near the stairs on the first floor of the factory, with a five-inch blade in a sheath at his waist, and waited patiently for Hannibal to bring him his next victim.

He was thinking about the last time, when the waiting had been agonizing. Then, when he’d been sitting there in the chair across from Weldon, waiting for him to wake up so that he’d be forced to look into his eyes when he killed him – back then he couldn’t have even said for sure, until the moment Weldon woke up, whether or not he was actually going to go through with it. Twice he had thought about leaving him tied to that chair unconscious and walking away, and twice he’d had to decide that he wasn’t going to.

But now…

Now, all the old objections were still there, in the back of his mind, whispering to him that this was insane, that all of his justifications were convenient lies, that he didn’t have to be this person, that it wasn’t too late to change his mind… but it was so easy to quiet those whispers. All he had to do was remember Shore’s victims, with their veins crawling across the floor through pools of blood, and the voice in his head telling him ‘no’ faded away to nothing.

_That’s what I’m preventing, those crawling veins. That’s what I’m removing from the world. He’ll never do it to anyone else, not ever again._

_Because of me._

He didn’t know if it was just the anticipation, or some product of his empathy, or if he was biting the inside of his cheek, but he thought he could taste blood in his mouth.

He wasn’t afraid.

And then there was the sound of a car creeping up around the side of the building, parking in the back to hide itself from the road. Will’s heart leapt into his throat.

He went to stand in the shadows by the empty doorframe. He took deep, even breaths, to see if he could slow his pulse.

And a few minutes later they were there, Hannibal and Shore, walking into the room, past the spot by the door where Will was waiting for them.

Sometimes, out in the stream, Will would have a fish snagged and struggling on a line, and he'd let his mind go clear and focused and he’d think, so calmly, _No, no. It’s too late for that. You're mine, you're already mine._

“Arthur Shore,” he said, and Shore and Hannibal turned around to face him. Will didn’t know what Hannibal had told him, in order to get him here, but Shore seemed surprised.

“Arthur,” said Hannibal, “I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine.”

Will stepped forward out of the shadows.

And maybe Shore noticed something in the way Will was holding himself, or in the way that Will and Hannibal turned their heads to look at him at exactly the same time. Maybe he glanced over at Hannibal’s face and noticed that his eyes, which had been so friendly before, had gone dark and flat and predatory.

Or maybe it was just the fact that Doctor Lecter and this stranger were suddenly standing between him and the only exit.

But Shore knew. He just knew.

And he bolted.

There was nowhere to go and no time to think, so he ran for the stairs, and Will heard himself laugh as he tore after him, because he’d thought he would have to herd him up there.

_The second floor, it’s half collapsed. There’s no other way down._

_Oh, god, you’re already mine._

He just let himself feel it. Why was he even trying not to? He’d made his choice. And he was going to enjoy it, because he _could._

He was flooded with adrenaline and he was darting up the stairs and he was going to kill this man and he was going to enjoy it.

He heard Hannibal on the stairs behind him, but Hannibal was irrelevant. Shore. Where was Shore?

If he had been smart, he would have stayed hidden. But as Will reached the second floor a chunk of brick flew past his face, barely missing him; as he spun to see where it had come from, another one slammed into his leg. It was going to bruise.

_Shore isn’t going to live long enough to bruise._

Will saw him, saw his eyes dart frantically around the vast factory floor, open and sunlit, no cover, nowhere to run. Saw him realize he’d have to fight.

He stood his ground as Will ran for him, another brick clasped in his hand. He was going to swing for his head, Will could see it, he was telegraphing his intentions too clearly, he wasn’t a trained fighter. So at the last second Will went low, driving his shoulder into Shore’s chest and knocking him to the floor.

The brick slammed into his hip, hard enough to make tears spring into his eyes, but Shore’d had the wind knocked out of him. And now Will was on him, looking down at him, he could see he was afraid. He could see he didn’t think he was going to win.

Will punched him twice in the face, hard enough that he heard something crack, before Shore managed to throw him off, really fighting for his life now, and scrambled up and began to back away.

He had chosen the wrong direction. He was backing toward a brick wall.

Will sprang to his feet and dove at Shore again, driving him into the wall, and he grabbed him before he could move and twisted his arm behind his back, slammed his face against the bricks, and now he had him pinned.

He was struggling, but Will had him pinned.

He felt something roll through him.

The brutality of the fight was receding like a rip tide; he was almost calm, he was throbbing with power, it was already over. There was nothing left to do now but finish it.

Shore would never know why. He'd only ever know that he had been brought here by a man he trusted, for another man to kill.

_Good._

_His victims didn't know why, either._

Will decided that he didn’t need the knife for this.

He spun Shore around again and slammed his back against the wall, and he wrapped his fingers around his neck and began to strangle him.

He watched the bloody, twitching face, the terrified eyes, felt the desperate sharp-nailed fingers scrabbling at him, he was close enough to breathe his breath, and he opened up the floodgates of his mind and let the other man pour into him, and it was like his own fingers were clawing at him, his hands were crushing his own throat –

 _Hannibal was so right, it’s so personal this way_ –

And Will was suddenly aware that Hannibal was there, just a few yards away, Hannibal was there and he was watching him, both of them, both of _him_ , was inside both of his minds, the victim and the predator, absorbing him. Will felt naked, exposed, picked apart and displayed like one of Shore’s victims –

And then Shore faded and collapsed, unconscious, into Will’s arms –

And then Will took Shore’s head in his hands, and slammed it against the wall.

One.

Two.

Three.

_Crack._

There was a smear of blood and other things gleaming wetly on the brick. Will let the body fall to the ground.

He was soaring.

He tore his eyes away from his victim and turned to look at Hannibal.

Hannibal, who was soaring, too.

No beautiful thing Hannibal had ever seen in his life had prepared him for the sight of Will’s face at that moment. If he had been a different kind of man, he would have fallen to his knees.

Instead he just looked at him and and breathed, “ _Will_.”

Will thought, _Hannibal._

He was struck by a certain similarity, then; this was just like Hobbes, wasn’t it? Will, standing in a beam of sunlight, tiny spots of blood flecking his face; his victim, an offering from Hannibal, slumped against the wall at his feet; and Hannibal, standing back in shadow and watching them, all of it a part of his design.

Will took a step toward Hannibal, and then another. Another. He was an arm’s length away now, and Hannibal hadn’t taken another step toward him; he was still as a statue, and he was looking at Will as if he worshipped him.

Will looked into Hannibal’s eyes, and he was still so blisteringly high from the kill, and he felt a sudden impulse, and he knew that if he stopped to think about it for even a single second, he wouldn’t do it at all.

So he didn’t think. He just did it – did something that, if he was honest with himself, he had been desperate to do for a very, very long time.

He drew back his arm, and he punched Hannibal Lecter in the face as hard as he could.

It laid Hannibal flat on his back; he’d never been less prepared to take a punch in his life. And before he could move, before he could think, Will was on him. His knee slammed into Hannibal’s chest, holding him down; his left hand pinned his right arm to the floor; and in his right hand, he had the knife.

Will pressed the edge of the blade against the side of Hannibal’s neck, hard enough to see a thin trickle of blood spring from his skin, close enough to the jugular vein that a twitch of Will’s fingers would end his life.

Hannibal wasn’t afraid. Not yet. But he knew what the knife could do to him, and he didn’t move.

“Will,” he asked, “what are you doing?”

“Hell if I know,” said Will, with a sudden smile. “Let’s find out.”


	12. Chapter 12

For an instant, neither of them breathed, and Will wondered whether he was going to murder Hannibal tonight.

_Let’s find out._

Will hadn’t been lying, when he’d said that; he really didn’t know what the hell he was doing. It had been an impulse, like the one he’d felt just before he’d thrown them both from the cliff.

And now here they were, suspended in midair again.

Hannibal was frozen on the ground beneath him, but Will couldn’t tell if he was frozen like a frightened rabbit or like a cat about to spring. Or like a stone. His staring eyes gave nothing away. Blood was trickling from his nose after the punch Will had thrown at him, streaming down the side of his upturned face; more blood oozed from the tiny cut that the knife had made in his neck and fell in thick drops to the floor. In the slanting evening light, even the drops of blood threw shadows.

It was hard for Will not to be distracted by the blood. In some hideous way it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen - Hannibal, still and bleeding on the ground, with a knife at his throat.

He couldn’t believe he had never made him bleed like this before.

He was half-delirious with the kill, and he knew it, and he knew that whatever he was doing, it was probably a serious mistake, and he really, really didn’t care. So many feelings he had kept walled off since the day he’d tried to kill them both were suddenly pouring out of him; he felt a little trembly, like electrical impulses were flickering through his body. He put the tiniest amount of pressure on the blade, just enough that Hannibal was forced to break his stillness and flinch away from it or risk being cut too deeply.

He could make him bleed, he could make him twitch, it was mesmerizing.

“If I do it,” said Will, and his voice sounded lower and angrier than he remembered it sounding, “if I kill you, it'll be your own damned fault, you know.”

“Will, I only ever -“

“ _Fuck_ , Hannibal, if you say you wanted what was _best for me_ I'll jam this thing in your eye. You didn’t want what was best for me, you just wanted _me_.”

_And I guess you’re about to get it._

He pressed down harder on Hannibal’s chest with his knee, just to hear him struggle to breathe. It was hard to remember, sometimes, that he even _needed_ to breathe.

He almost didn’t care if Hannibal killed him for this.

“You said you’d tear out my throat with your fingers if I was lying to you,” he hissed. “Do you have _any idea_ how many times you’ve lied to _me?_ ”

He dug his fingers harder into Hannibal’s arm, the one that was pinned against the floor, hard enough to bruise, an implicit threat. He could do it, right now, if he wanted to. Maybe he should. He could see it in his mind so clearly, he could feel it, how his fingers would sink into the soft flesh, curve behind the larynx and tear, there would be so much blood…

As Hannibal lay there on his back and watched Will imagine ripping out his throat, he tried and failed to make his head stop swimming. He’d seen stars when Will had hit him, and then when his head had smacked against the ground, the world had gone white for a moment. His nose was throbbing, he thought it might be broken, he could taste the blood from it running down the back of his throat; and then there was the crush of Will’s iron grip on his arm; and if Will knelt down on his chest much harder, he thought one of his ribs might crack.

But all those pains were minor, meaningless.

The world had shrunk to nothing but the knife and his neck and Will’s eyes. Those savage eyes.

He was almost sure that Will wasn’t really going to kill him. He just had a point to make, or he was still charged up from the kill and needed an outlet for it; or it was a game, or part of some plan, or…

…or Will was going to kill him.

If this wasn't a game then he needed to act, now. The knife was close enough and sharp enough that he might find himself bleeding to death before he even realized he’d been cut. He should take the knife. He should do it right now. His left hand was still free, he could take it before Will cut him if he was quick. Will was too unpredictable to allow this to go on.

But…

Hannibal was captivated.

This was a Will he had never seen before.

He had seen Will angry at him, murderously angry - twice he had pointed a loaded gun at him, and at least one of those times he had intended to pull the trigger. And there had been other times, both before and after the cliff, when he had seen Will’s face light up with the most elaborate fantasies of killing him. But this was something else again.

Those times, he had looked at Hannibal like an enemy. Now he was looking at him like prey.

Hannibal thought: _This is the last thing they saw._

If it became clear that Will was actually going to kill him, he would stop him. But he couldn’t bring himself to end it now, not yet, this was glorious.

Will was pretty sure he could guess what Hannibal was thinking, then, and it filled him with rage. _His pet, he thinks I’m just his little murder pet, he thinks this is a game-_

No one had ever looked at Will the way Hannibal looked at him, and Hannibal had never looked at him like this. He couldn’t stand it. Will was threatening to kill him and he still wouldn’t stop _looking_ at him…

_What the hell would I have to do to him, to make him stop looking at me that way?_

“Don't look at me,” he said. “Look at _him._ ” He nudged Hannibal’s neck with the blade again, made him turn his head to where Shore’s body lay collapsed against the wall. “You cared about him. You taught him and you protected him and then I just _asked_ for him and you gave him to me.” Will’s brain was sparking, now, and he was suddenly very curious about something, and he wondered aloud:

“If you’d let me kill him, what else would you let me do?”

“Will-“

“ _Shut up_.”

He thought about every violation, every lie, every undeserved death he’d seen at Hannibal’s hands, there were too many to list, too many to remember…

With something like awe beginning to build in his mind, he said slowly, “There isn't a single thing I could do to you right now that you wouldn't deserve.”

He pressed down on Hannibal’s chest with his knee again, but it was just a distraction – when he felt Hannibal fighting to breathe he shifted lightning-quick and slammed the knee down on Hannibal’s free left hand, grinding it into the grit of the floor, and now Will had both of his arms pinned; he yanked Hannibal’s other arm down and knelt on it with his other leg, and now he was straddling Hannibal and both of his hands were free, and the knife was still at Hannibal’s neck-

(Hannibal thought, _oh, I should_ definitely _try to stop him now-)_

And for a long second, Will thought about how it would be just to end it now, this moment, cut the artery and let the blood shower him and stop this insanity forever.

He wanted to. He really, desperately wanted to. Or part of him did. His concentration was focused on the point of the knife like a beam through a glass, it would just take the smallest slice…

He flipped the knife around in his hand and slammed the cutting edge down on Hannibal’s shoulder.

Blood poured from him, pooling in the collar of his shirt, staining Will’s fingers. Will felt Hannibal’s muscles tense underneath him, saw him wince, it took his breath away; he dragged the blade down, felt it scrape against the collarbone, he felt as if he should be shaking but he was so calm, this was perfect, perfect, Hannibal was in _pain._ Anyone who didn’t know him like Will knew him would have thought he was barely responding, but Will could see. He was so aware of every sharp inhalation, every beautiful twitch, he could see the sweat beading at his hairline.

He kept cutting, down, down, the cut was inches long now. The blade parted Hannibal’s skin like the prow of a boat parting water, leaving blood in its foaming wake.

_How did I never know, why didn’t I know how easy it would be to hurt him?_

The rage was almost secondary now; he was fascinated, he was fixated on the cutting. He would never have believed, before this moment, that he could torture a man and feel no guilt at all. He was sure he could never have done it to anyone else.

But Hannibal _deserved_ it.

And in that shocking absence of guilt… god, it felt so good to hurt him.

Hannibal’s skin was pale, now; Will could feel him clenching his fists. His eyes were still boring into Will, but Will didn’t care anymore, Will was staring at the cut slowly lengthening under his hand. He had never seen anything so red.

The knife was almost down to Hannibal’s chest, his shirt was in the way, so Will wrenched it open with his free hand, scattering buttons, let the knife glide down across Hannibal’s ribs.

He wasn’t even thinking about killing him anymore. He just didn’t want to stop cutting him.

And Hannibal… Hannibal was having trouble thinking.

The world was blurred around the edges; the burning from the knife was radiating through him. Every cell in his body screamed for him to twist away, to throw Will off of him and take the knife and put a stop to this. He was vibrating with a primal need to make it stop.

It would have been easier to bear, if he had actually been restrained.

Now that the knife wasn’t pressed against his throat, now that the danger could be measured in seconds and not instants, it would have been easy to take it from him.

But he didn’t.

He let the pain flood him, let the endorphins do their work, let that chemical euphoria build in him; and alongside it, he felt a euphoria that had nothing at all to do with the pain.

Will’s head was tilted to the side, his lips were gently parted, and there was a calm, measured sadism burning in his eyes.

How could it be that this perfect, radiant monster lived inside his Will?

How was it possible that they had never met before?

Hannibal wondered if he had looked as beautiful to Will as Will looked to him now, when he had cut him open. He wondered if he had glowed like this. And he forced himself to remember, through the pain, through the surging endorphin high, that he might still have to try to take the knife, if Will went much further.

He needed to remind himself of that, because some part of him wanted to know what it would feel like when this lovely cruel Will sank a blade into his heart.

Will watched him, attuned to every shudder, soaking up his pain. He could feel the knife jump as it passed over each rib, and he knew that if he didn’t stop soon he’d hit gut; and then, if he kept pressing down like this, the knife would plunge right into him, down to the hilt.

He remembered the cold wrongness of the blade slipping inside him, that time in Hannibal’s kitchen.

He could taste the blood in the air.

“You could stop me, couldn’t you?” he whispered. “You could throw me off right now and take the knife away from me. But you won't.”

He wondered if he could make him scream.

He moved his free hand to the cut, at his shoulder when the knife had bitten deepest, and he dug his fingers in.

He felt the muscles pulse and seize, the blood was hot on his fingers, and Hannibal’s composure cracked, and Will heard something that was not quite a gasp or a moan or a snarl, some animal sound.

_Oh, THERE._

There it was, god, that _sound_ \- he couldn’t remember ever wanting anything else, except to make Hannibal make that sound.

“Oh,” said Will, “did you want me to _stop_?”

He pressed his fingers down harder, and now Hannibal was struggling to control his breathing.

_I wonder if he’d beg me._

“Come on, Hannibal,” he hissed. “Aren't you going to say 'stop, if you loved me you'd stop’?”

And something flashed in Hannibal’s eyes and in the space of an instant he had wrenched his hand free and his fingers were wrapped around Will’s bloody wrist and Will barely had time to wonder how Hannibal was going to make him die-

-before he saw that Hannibal had pulled the bloody knife-hand up to hover over his own heart.

He let go of Will’s wrist, but Will was trapped by his eyes.

Hannibal growled, “Not in a thousand years.”

Will wondered, if he slid the knife in between the ribs, how many times he’d get to feel his heart pulse around the blade before it stopped forever. He could kill him just like he’d killed the others, and then he’d be free.

He laid his hand on Hannibal’s chest, and felt his heartbeat.

Somehow, after everything else he’d just done, somehow the fact that he'd made Hannibal’s heart race was the thing he could least believe. Blood was throbbing up beneath his fingers, and he was transfixed, drowning, they were both drowning in Hannibal’s blood.

Will lowered his head to Hannibal’s chest, so that he could listen to his heart, and Hannibal placed a shaking hand on his back.

* * *

They were never sure, later, how long they had lain there that way, sprawled on the dirty floor and waiting for their hearts to slow. It could have been minutes or hours later when Will finally raised his head again and looked down at Hannibal, and the side of his face was bloody now with Hannibal’s blood, and if he had decided to slide the knife in right then, Hannibal doubted he could have brought himself to lift a hand to stop him.

Hannibal thought Will looked a little nervous, suddenly. Unsure if he had gone too far. Maybe he was thinking that Hannibal was going to hurt him after all, now; maybe he even thought he’d deserve it.

Hannibal reached up and laid his fingertips gently on Will’s bloody cheek. He barely knew his own voice, choked and exhausted, as he said, “Will… you are terrifying.”

Will smiled at him then, smiled like he had smiled in the gallery that time when Hannibal had told him he’d remember that moment forever.

There were going to be so many more moments.


	13. Chapter 13

Will would have been perfectly happy to go on lying there indefinitely, but he was dimly aware that one of them should probably do something about the bleeding. It had slowed, but it hadn’t stopped; a little more seeped from the cut with every breath Hannibal took, and his face was pale.

He couldn’t think of any other way to put it, so Will just said, “Are you… going to be ok?”

Hannibal managed a smile. “Most likely. If we bind it up now I may even stay conscious.”

Oh. Right. What an incredible pain in the ass it would be if Hannibal passed out from blood loss at a crime scene. Will stood, not quite steady himself, yet, and went downstairs to retrieve the med kit. They’d brought it along as a precaution, in case Shore had managed to hurt Will. The idea seemed ludicrous now.

He found the bag where they’d hidden it and headed back to the stairs. He paused halfway up, leaned on the bannister and breathed and tried to stop the sudden spinning in his head.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d walked out of an encounter with Hannibal and felt like he’d _won._ He wasn’t sure it had ever happened. Not like this, not this completely.

He had spent years fighting desperately for every tiny scrap of control over Hannibal that he could manage to find. He had finally given up everything else in his life and let Hannibal have him, in exchange for a single indulgence on Hannibal’s part: not killing. And he had known, every moment of every day, that Hannibal's continued indulgence was not guaranteed.

He had been living in fear of the day when Hannibal decided he was tired of indulging him, and began to kill again; or, even worse, of the day when Hannibal decided he was tired of waiting for him to break, and invaded his mind so thoroughly that he became nothing but Hannibal’s toy and ceased to exist as Will Graham.

He really should have given himself more credit.

Apparently he had more power over Hannibal than he had ever imagined, because what Hannibal had allowed him to do tonight had not been an indulgence.

It had been a surrender.

He knew this didn’t mean that it was over. It would never be over, not while they were both still alive - it was always going to be this same zero-sum game. But Will was getting better at playing it. And the better he got at playing it, the more he found he liked it.

* * *

They bandaged the wound as well as they could, given the circumstances, and then Will helped Hannibal down to the car and left him there to wait while he dealt with the evidence. First there was the body to bury, in the grave they’d dug in the basement two nights ago. Then he would deal with the bloodstains, cover them in oxygen bleach and pile debris on top of them. If anyone ever found them and bothered to have them tested, which wasn’t likely, the bleach would have taken care of the DNA.

Hannibal wanted to tell him not to bother with all that. He should just set the whole place on fire, and then they could watch it burn together. But he was aware that he was suffering from blood loss and might not be thinking completely coherently, so he decided not to mention it.

* * *

They didn’t speak much on the drive back to the motel, but it was a struggle for Will to keep his eyes on the road. He couldn’t seem to stop himself from glancing over at Hannibal, who was resting his head against the cool glass of the car window and keeping pressure on the wound with his hand.

Hannibal was not trying not to look at Will. He had no interest in looking at anything else at the moment.

He had been a fool to let him do it. Will could easily have killed him, he could have caused permanent damage, there was still a chance that the wound might not heal well; he might even contract an infection severe enough that he’d be forced to go to a hospital, and then, if they were recognized…

He didn't care.

He was afraid that he was going to wake up from a dream.

He had been so sure that he knew Will’s limits. He had resigned himself to the fact that he would only ever be able to push him so far, and he had been satisfied with that. Until tonight.

Tonight, when he’d seen what Will kept hiding underneath his person suit.

It would only be a matter of time until they killed together again. Will already wanted it – Hannibal need only wait until he wanted it more than he wanted to deprive Hannibal of it. After what he had seen tonight, he didn’t think that would take very long at all.

And when it finally happened, it would not be the desperate feral Will of the cliff house. It would be the Will he had met tonight. The one who had smashed a man’s skull like an afterthought, before turning to him with a knife in his hand and smiling.

Who knew how much farther Will’s lines would blur, when that monster of his was finally standing side by side with the Ripper?

* * *

Will hung back, unsure of how much help to offer, as Hannibal walked unsteadily to the bathroom of their motel room. He needed to deal with the wound properly before he could sleep, and he very much wanted to sleep. There were more supplies here, antibiotic patches, running water, it was clean enough. He would manage.

He washed his hands and peeled off the bandages, working one-handed and leaning on the counter for support, watching his blood drip darkly onto the white porcelain tile. He cleaned the wound, disinfected it, laid out everything he’d need to bandage it again. Then he opened the kit with the suture supplies and began to thread a needle.

“Wait,” said Will. “Are you kidding me? You can’t give yourself stitches right now!”

Hannibal muttered, “I am a _surgeon_ , Will.”

“You’re a surgeon who’s about to pass out and smack your head against the sink. Can’t it _wait_?”

“No.”

“Then - just lie down and let me do it.”

Ridiculous. Hannibal had shown Will how to suture a wound, once, but on a chicken carcass – he had never once done it to a person before. Hannibal could likely have done a better job of it than Will even in his current state and blindfolded, and if Will did it, the wound might not heal as quickly or as well –

– but the idea of lying down was suddenly sounding very appealing.

“All right,” he said.

Will helped him to the bed, put a towel underneath him, and went off to scrub his hands before returning with the threaded needle. Hannibal gave him a few brief instructions – where, and how many, and which knot to use. But as soon as his head had hit the pillow, he had decided that this was actually a very good idea and that he didn’t much care, after all, how good of a job Will did, as long as it got done and he could finally go to sleep.

He hadn't given himself a topical anesthetic, because when he performed surgery on himself he needed to be able to feel what he was doing. He realized, as Will began to set the first stitch, that he had forgotten to tell Will this.

But he found it didn’t matter, because he could barely feel the needle weaving in and out of his flesh.

All he could feel were Will’s hands.

All he could see was Will’s face, focused on his task, occasionally glancing up to meet his eyes, suddenly almost shy -

\- and then he winced as the needle slipped and plunged too deep into the muscle of his chest.

Will said, “Oh, shit, sorry!”

Hannibal thought that was one of the funniest things he had ever heard in his life. “ _Now_ you’re sorry?” he asked.

Will just looked at him for a moment, and then went back to the needle. But Hannibal could see a hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth.

* * *

A little while later, Hannibal lay in the darkened room and listened to the steady beat of the shower, as Will washed off what was left of the blood. His hand was resting on the bandage, and he wished that it didn’t have to be there, so that he could feel Will’s sutures under his fingertips.

He was glad, now, that he’d let Will do the sutures. There was going to be such a beautiful scar. He wondered if Will had thought, yet, about the scar, or if he was only going to realize later how perfectly it matched his own.

When he had cut Will open, all those years ago, he had not done it only to cause him pain. Although there _had_ been that, of course; that need to give back some small measure of the pain that Will had given him, to take all that rage and smear it on a knife blade and wipe it off inside him. But he had also done it to remind his Will, since he seemed to have forgotten, that he was Hannibal’s – remind him with a mark that he could never wash away.

Even if Will had never come back to him, even if he had let Hannibal die in that prison without ever seeing his face again, Will would still have had the scar. He would have seen it in the mirror every day, touched it when he bathed, felt it tug against his skin when he turned his body; he would have woken up to the burn of phantom pain beneath it in the middle of the night as it spoke to him in his dreams, saying: _You're mine. Mine, and no one else's._

And now, Will had given Hannibal that same gift.

When Hannibal looked at himself in the mirror, from now until the day he died, he would see Will's name written on his body.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll come back and say more here later, but to everyone who's been reading along with this as I posted it: I really can't thank you all enough. I haven't been this engaged with a writing project in a long time, and it's because of you guys.
> 
> I love your comments like Hannibal loves blood on Will's face: extravagantly.
> 
> I'm on Tumblr at theglintoftherail.tumblr.com


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